Flickr in Colour

Flickr users add over 4,000 images per minute to the wildly popular image-sharing site. Over ten million images have been tagged with the Creative Commons tag -- allowing for creative, and sometimes commercial re-use. Ideé Inc has taken those ten million-odd images and created an interesting little search engine called Multicolr Search Lab. The only search 'term' allowed is colour. Click  on the little grid of colour swatches at top right, and the main part of the screen will be filled with images primarily containing that colour. Click on another colour, and the engine locates images with both the original colour and the new colour.  The results can be quite startling, and very useful if you are looking for a background image, or a texture. Not much use if you need to refine the search by subject or theme, but an interesting pointer as to the kind of capabilities that smart search image engines will soon be able to offer.