http://ysearchblog.com/2009/04/03/image-search-preview-page-overhaul/

It looks good. I like the recent images section, viewing web pages without having to keep clicking the back button and the option to restrict by type (Flickr/No Flickr). It seemed like 90% of their images were coming from Flickr before.

They've surpassed Google and MS with this offering UI-wise. The only thing I like better is MS's infinite scroll and vertically oriented preview. Yahoo's half-height web page preview is not as useful.

I would like to see Google add more dynamic scrolling functionality now. Maybe they could leave the new ad section fixed (or move it to the right hand side and have it auto update to new ads as the user scrolls thru images. They need to do something with their interface soon as both Yahoo and MS have now surpassed it and made it much easier to find and view images.

It looks horrible. It stands out too much, most webpages are white... Black wtf? Also it's way too busy. Then, the tabs in the actual image search results page are ugly, don't fit in with the new theme and look like they've been there since 1997

James
The black doesn't bother me so much – but it could be a little more subtle. And it sets the search results section apart from the web page below it. I don't know what tabs you are referring to – I don't any.

It needs some more refinement overall, but I think it makes the image discovery process easier and more intuitive by reducing back and forth clicks and showing some 'other searches' options that may be useful too.

I think Google can adapt some of this type of exploration flow while still keeping their results simple. Picasa Web has some of this flavor to it now. If they can incorporate some of that design into image search, it could be interesting.

I can see this design and features working for Yahoo or Live. But Google is just different. Google follows a simple and ugly interface. If it would adapt the UI from Yahoo, it'll have to change the UI for the rest of its products.

I'm not sure if you noticed, but Yahoo has the first image search engine that actually embeds the original image in the preview page (some people name this practice "hotlinking"). Other search engines use thumbnails hosted on their servers.