Yahoo has continued its buying spree by acquiring an image recognition startup. IQ Engines, a startup specializing in recognizing items in photographs and cataloging such items, has been purchased for an undisclosed amount by Yahoo, with the team behind it shuttering its API in the next 30 days and moving over to work with Yahoo employees working on Flickr.
The acquisition notice spotted by TechCrunch states that it will be working on “improving photo organization and search for the community,” which could include automatic recognition of locations, people, and items within an image. Considering that users can choose not to bother adding relevant tags to an uploaded image, the automatic tagging of such content would possibly allow for more relevant search results to appear on Flickr than at present.
