I'm looking through Flickr for a picture of a brain (no questions) and am running into a familiar problem. I like to use the interestingness filter because it usually pulls up very compelling images. The problem is that you have to go for pages before you see a picture of a brain because it's pulling up the most interesting photos that have your keyword anywhere on the page - tags, groups, descriptions, comments. The top photo for "brain" and "roots" is the same: a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. In addition there is the problem of "tag spam" where people add huge lists of irrelevant (or slightly relevant) tags to get more views. Check out this photo's tags:
Action, Active, Activities, Activity, Adorable, Adult, Affection, Affectionately, Affectionate...Yellow, Young, Youngster, Youth
Maybe the solution is the relevance filter with a secondary sort by interestingness. But it brings up some of the problems of group metadata for filtering when there is the incentive (non-monetary even) and ability to push your content to the top.
That's where Google excels:
http://images.google.com/images?q=brain
Posted by: Andy | February 25, 2007 at 09:53 PM
Flickr recently introduced a new limit of 75 tags per photo, which might help cut down on the problem of irrelevant tags. There were a few voices of discontent, but they're a bit drowned in this discussion by the new contact limit.
http://www.flickr.com/forums/help/32686/
Posted by: Paul Mison | February 26, 2007 at 05:34 AM