Yahoo is also responding to the challenges posed by search refinements being carried out by its competitors. So, it just introduced a refinement to its Image Search service by way of what it calls as travel image refiner. This sort of acts as a virtual navigator to travel spots if you search for them on Yahoo Image Search.
The Yahoo Travel Image Refiner allows users to explore various points of interest related to specific travel areas including contextual information about these destinations.
It’s a pretty simple search filter enhancement actually. So when a user enters the search term “Paris”, the search results page will include a navigation link on the left of the page listing down various points of interest related to the main search.
Clicking on the travel image refiner will pull out various images related to the specific points of interest. From there users can explore the different images and get a sort of virtual tour of the travel area. Clicking on images from other sites will bring up a framed page with the top frame containing the Yahoo Image exploration tab and the lower frame containing the page where the image was culled from. Users also have the option to turn off the upper Yahoo tab anytime.
The Yahoo Image Refiner currently works with location-specific searches but Yahoo is planning to roll it out with other types of images soon.
