I have no idea how Flickr became a standard that fast, but since Yahoo! bought the company, it has been going very well with Flickr. Already one of the largest photo databases on the internet with literally millions of images.
So, don’t be surprised if the verb ‘flickring’ becomes the standard when searching for images, as googling became the standard for finding webpages. Of course you can search on the site itself, but the Flickr Postcard Browser is much more fun to use.