Picasa, flickr, and Google Image Search

Thomas Hawk, whose comments on images uploaded via Picasa ranking higher than images uploaded to flickr were reported by Robert Scoble, has stepped up to provide a much deeper set of observations - Why Picasa Images Are Indexed Higher in Google Image Search Than Flickr.

He quickly dismisses the conspiracy theory, and elaborates on the fact that providing a good filename is key, which uploads to blogs made by Picasa do, but which files uploaded into flickr do not.

flickr users are discussing this in Google is Penalizing Flickr, Right?, where Thomas has made some more insightful comments - including that it is a problem that his own employer, Zooomr (which also replaces upload filenames with a number) may have to address in the future.