Flickr Searches came about following a long love affair with the photo and video sharing website flickr.com. I was impressed with not only the volume of photography on this site but the quality. It is fascinating to me to "surf" through the pages of flickr. It's a seemingly endless stream of thought.

After a while I began to think about how people search for things. I thought deeply about the differences between the way a person might search for an image and the way a computer might do it. Clearly, the computer version is simply an extension of the human. What I noticed in my own interaction with flickr was that I usually had no real idea "what" I was searching for. Or, perhaps in the beginning I had a thought, a keyword, some metadata that I could use to begin my fun. This would quickly change during my visit. In fact, it could easily change after looking at the first result.

I wondered -- "How do we work our way through information?" The searches collected here on this website are presented in a somewhat rigid manner. While the content changes at a seeming instantaneous pace, you are forced to view the images in sequence--my sequence. I have done the searching for you, and ordered the results, and while you can skip ahead and backwards throughout the results, these are your only options. It is "presented" in a strict slideshow form, much like the pages of a book.

In my visits to flickr I noticed that I never browse imagery in this way. It is really rare that a slideshow would garner the same level of satisfaction that a step by step style of browsing would reveal. I find this to be similar in nature to the way I browse content on the internet. How often do you browse the results of a Google search in the order Google presents them to you?

What I am talking about here is what is known as Faceted Browsing. One result creates a new set of results. The viewer can step their way through search results in a myriad of directions. This is especially possible with flickr groups. Begin with a simple search, travel to the page of the first result and you will almost always find new results in other connected groups. The possibilities are seemingly endless.

The searches on this page are based on a "dogs" and "skylines." At right you will see a menu page of searches which I think deserve a close look. Enjoy!