14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo recently unveiled an Image Search redesign which included a couple of interesting new features like photo slideshows. Now Yahoo is showcasing yet another interesting feature, thanks to its deep partnership with Facebook, which adds public Facebook photo albums from your friends to the search results.
"[W]e now feature slideshows as a part of Yahoo! Image Search results with a cool 'theater mode' experience for you to sit back and enjoy images," Anuj Sahai, Product Manager for Multimedia Search at Yahoo, wrote.
"You will see collections of top images from all of Yahoo!’s great content sites packaged as slideshows on various relevant topics. We are also showcasing sets of great public imagery from Flickr to provide you the best collection of images on the web," he explained.
"Also, with our new 'Facebook Album Search beta' feature, you can now find public albums from the friends and family you’re connected to on Facebook (after you have linked your Yahoo! and Facebook accounts)," he announced.
Similar in concept to Google's Social Search, any image search on Yahoo can now add photos from your friends' Facebook albums, if they are relevant to the search.
The photos can either show up below the regular image search results, or in the new slideshow interface. Facebook album slideshows will show up below photos from Yahoo properties and Flickr albums.
The new Facebook integration feature could prove very useful in a number of cases and users will likely end up discovering a lot more photos of their friends and family than they would normally have.
Note that the Yahoo Search only looks at the albums your Facebook friends have made public. The new feature is labeled as beta, but is live for everyone.
Yahoo has been building a social layer into most of its products through the Facebook partnership announced earlier this year. Yahoo Mail has probably gotten the most Facebook-related features, but Yahoo isn't done yet.