Image search engine FeelImage, previously discussed here, has stopped displaying Flickr results in its pages.

This comes after Cybele, along with others, noticed that the site appeared to violating Flickr’s terms of use and posted about it in the Flickr forum.

In the replies to Cybele’s post, a Flickr staff member named “Kevin” posted a comment on Saturday clarifying that FeelImage was not using Flickr’s API but was instead doing a simple tag search. He closed his comment by saying that “We’ll try and put the kibbosh on them shortly.”

It appears that, whatever action Flickr took, was effective as results on FeelImage are completely devoid of Flickr results and are instead largely limited to results from Japanese photo-sharing site Zorg.

FeelImage, for their part, is on vacation until the 19th of this month but did post a brief statement on their blog asking anyone who does not want their photo displayed on the site to email them.

Though it is sad that FeelImage has been crippled so badly. especially just after obtaining such broad press exposure, any such search engine is going to have to follow the rules and standard practices in regards to indexing content and it appears that FeelImage was not.

Hopefully, in time, they can fix their system and repair the relationship with the offended Flickr users. It would be nice to have this technology available, but not if it creates more copyright issues than it resolves, as was the case under the old system.

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