Flickr announced last week some new offerings to the search engine. And while you can get a lot more information out of the search results page, I found I had to be pretty careful with the mouse!

You can do a Flickr search off any page, and of course there’s an advanced search page available at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. This page allows you to narrow your search results by media type, date, and of course by Creative Commons-licensed content.

Now the search results show a whole page of thumbnails. The search box at the top of the results page allows you to narrow your search results from everything to those shots in the Getty Images collection or those in The Commons. (It’s great to have an easy to way to switch your search to Commons results.) Options over on the right of your search result give you the option to narrow your search to group, photographer, tag cluster, or even location.

This new search also allows you to get information about the individual images, and this is what I found to be tricky. If you’re in the small or medium view of search results (the default is small), hold your mouse over an image. You’ll see that a small i appears in the lower right corner. If you hold your mouse over that i in just the right way, and click on it, you’ll get a popup window with more information about the image including the number of views, comments, favorites, tags, and the date it was taken. You can see an example of this in this page of search results for tamales (haven’t had breakfast yet, again.)

If you DON’T click on it correctly — and it took me a little while to get the hang of it — you end up going to the individual picture page. I’m kind of surprised that you can’t get a popup of information just by mousing over the image, but I guess that would be a lot more information that would have to be loaded. I consider myself pretty good with a mouse, but that little i gave me a heck of a time.

In addition to the pictures view, you can also view group results for your search (man, people take their tamales seriously)
and people as well. Obviously the kind of results you get for this is going to vary depending on what kind of searching you’re doing.

Flickr has managed to come up with a search design that provides a lot of information without having to go through a lot
of pages. If I can just get that little lower right i to work right, I’ll get a lot out of this search.