Author Topic: New search engine - Yay! (Read 8798 times)

Bateleur · « **on:** October 10, 2006, 04:22 »

Wey-hey! Something's changed with the Alamy search engine.

It's always been a mystery to me how it came up with images from a search. I've a simple image of a green poison bottle, isolated on white, which I've been playing about with, trying to suss out the ranking order, and work out ways of moving myself up closer to the top. Nothing seemed to work.

Last week, entering the 3 keywords 'green', 'poison' and 'bottle' put me way down towards the bottom of the two pages of images that came up, after a whole slew of images of firemen putting out a car fire (what's that got to do with green poison bottles?)

Now, suddenly, exactly the same search puts me on the second row of the first page, and the firemen have been relegated to the bottom.

Yay!

leaf · « **Reply #1 on:** October 10, 2006, 04:46 »

sounds good. maybe my images moved to the top too

did you by the way add any more images to alamy in the recent past?

Bateleur · « **Reply #2 on:** October 10, 2006, 12:50 »

Yes, I continue to upload to Alamy (Actually, send them CDs. They don't have an online upload feature yet).

Boy! People complain about iStock being slow at inspecting images. Alamy's even slower. They still haven't done a batch of images I sent them a month ago.

I just hang in there.

Striker77s · « **Reply #3 on:** October 10, 2006, 14:25 »

I'm a part of the Alamy group on Yahoo and they discuss the search at great length. So sign up to get the gory detail. They have been supposidly been working on a new search engine for over two years. I haven't been looking at the group lately to know if it has been finally implimented. In the past each person was ranked into three tiers. It was a mystery how they did it. But essentially you were ranked on your first test images. Once the ranking is set you are stuck no matter how good your future images are. Also other agencies negotiated with Alamy to get a higher ranking so most people are put into the 2nd or 3rd tier. When someone does a search it lists all of the images in the first tier before the other tiers. So if someone's image is in the 1st tier and only has a few of the searched keywords it will list them before yours which has all of the keywords because you are on tier 3. It annoyed me and a lot of other people to no end, but there wasn't anything you could do about it. Your ranked tier made a huge difference on your sales so a lot of people are frustrator over it. Alamy has been claiming to be developing a new search engine for over year to try and qwell the frustration. They claim it will be more fair. Hopefully it is.

Mark

Bateleur · « **Reply #4 on:** October 10, 2006, 15:31 »

Oh boy! That's an awful system. I didn't know that. So, presumably, my fiddling about with keywords was a useless exercise.

I must admit, I wondered about other people's keywording on Alamy. Some contributors seemed to have almost no keywords. And others had huge numbers of keywords in the 'description' field and nothing in the keywords field. I wondered why the did it and if anyone found their images that way.

But, I guess, if they were agencies and in the first rank, they didn't care. Their images would rise to the top anyway.

I must go back and look to see if those weird keyworders are agencies.

The other thing that I discovered with my 'fiddling about' last week was that my images came up in different places depending on whether I was logged in or not. When I searched for my green bottle image and I was logged in it came up quite near the top. If I was not logged in, using the same keywords, it came on the last page. Guess I must have been in rank 3

Whatever ... something definitely seems to have changed with them, and I'm happy about that.

leaf · « **Reply #5 on:** October 10, 2006, 16:27 »

also i have heard talk about that it has to do with the amount if images you have online (which is why i asked if you uploaded recently)

Bateleur · « **Reply #6 on:** October 10, 2006, 16:45 »

Quote from: leaf on October 10, 2006, 16:27

... it has to do with the amount if images you have online ...

Can you say what it has to do with the amount of images, Tyler? Is it better if you have more? Or worse?

Striker77s · « **Reply #7 on:** October 10, 2006, 18:44 »

The keywording quality can be horrible at Alamy. Especially when it comes to Agencies. At one point some agency had several thousand images that all had the exact same keywords for every image. It was ridiculous. With Alamy you don't keyword until after the image has been accepted or rejected. So the quality control people never see it after it has been keyworded. So unless someone specifically complains about an image the photographer can do what ever he/she wants. It just goes to show that even the macrostocks have their issues.

Many people on the Alamy group did all sorts of things to their keywords to try and manipulate the search engine and get better placement. It was a community effort to figure out about the whole tiered system. Once it was figured out everything fell into place and it was obvious. If you could move a tier up by having a large amount of images I didn't hear of it, but I wouldn't doubt it. I was stuck in tier 3. So my images were always at the bottom.

I tried to search for a few of my images and they are coming up at the top if I pick certain keywords. Which didn't happen before so things must have changed. Yeah!

Mark

leaf · « **Reply #8 on:** October 11, 2006, 01:40 »

when did this discussion take place strikker? I didn't see it, but then again I end up deleted a number of the alamy group posts before i read them.

Well maybe i am mistaken then, but I thought it was, the more images you had, the higher it would push your ranking.. and as such large agencies would get to the top, as well as big producers, but not I am not so sure.

Striker77s · « **Reply #9 on:** October 11, 2006, 09:30 »

It was about 6 months ago. I can't imagine you missing it because for one week solid everyone was talking about it. My memory isn't good enough to give you an exact week.

Mark