Hacker News Reader

Yotophoto.com

Was the web's first search engine for libre (free to use) images, mostly Creative Commons and Public Domain. One of the things I'm most proud of was a "search by color" feature that was very fast, accurate and way ahead of what anyone else was doing at the time (IMHO).

Yotophoto was doing a million searches (~100k unique) per day at one point.

View on HN

I did the exact same thing at reusableimages.com a few years back, but gave up due to lack of traffic and a growing sense of being out of my league. The site just uses Yahoo image search now.

How come you killed it? I'm guessing it's because it was tough to monetize?

It wasn't necessarily difficult to monetize (mostly via ads for Microstock imagery sites). But it was quite difficult to scale the technology. I made great progress optimizing the crawler and search tech but eventually lost interest.

Google and Flickr also added Creative Commons image search options eventually.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com