What's the best web image search API?

Question

What's the best image search API for general image search (eg. find pictures of potatoes, paris hilton, or scarface), available for remote invocation from a server (ie. not in-browser javascript)?

• The Yahoo API is nicely setup and well documented, is easy to use, and includes image thumbnails. This looks like the best candidate so far. The only problem I'm running into is many of the images in the results are no longer on the web.
• The Google API is mostly oriented for invocation within the browser. The JSON version doesn't include thumbnails. Not sure how the quality of results compare to Yahoo.
• The Flickr API is great and the results are very likely not to be broken. However, it's not a general search API - it only searches flickr images, so it'll miss most movie posters, etc.

Are there other image search APIs I should be looking at? Anyone know the relative quality of Yahoo vs. Google image search results?

Answer 1

Live Search also has an image search API, and their relevance usually measures similar to Google and better than Yahoo.

You'll have to first get an API key from the Search Developer Center, and then you'll be able to run queries such as this one that returns JSON, or this one that returns XML.

Answer 2

To close this off - I ended up going with Yahoo's API, later found out how to get thumbnails from Google's API.

A few points on each:

• Yahoo's API is clean, well documented, and easy to use
• The quality of the results seems pretty even, although Google's seems slightly better. Or maybe that's just branding coloring my perception.
• Google's API seems to only allow 'small' or 'big' return sizes, which return 4 and 8 results respectively. This is too few for my needs; I'd like at least 20 for each query.