On iStock search

excitement - 601,966 results
https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/excitment?license=rf&phrase=excitment&assettype=image&sort=best

excited - 766,167 results
https://www.istockphoto.com/photos/excited?license=rf&phrase=excited&assettype=image&sort=best

Just wondering why the search results are different? When you upload via the ESP, excited is not even an option in their CV, excitement is the only available option. I 'assume' their CV understands excitement and excited are exactly the same thing, so I would have also assumed their search results for the two words would have been identical, but they are not.

Normally this isn't something I care about or would spend anytime thinking about, but recently I've been quite curious about how their algorithm work. A while back I read a comment from them saying titles and descriptions are just for SEO and don't mean anything on the site, but from random searches I've done on their site, I am forming a hunch that isn't entirely accurate. I 'think' their algorithm does take titles and descriptions into account for search results, to what degree I'm not sure. But I don't think they ignore it entirely for search. 

Surely SEO includes the iStock 'search engine'? I'd be highly surprised if titles and descriptions didn't factor into search results.

They claim titles and descriptions (the latter of which don't even show on the file pages of non-editorial images, crazily) are for external search engines only and don't feature in their internal search. In my tiny-scale testing, only on my own files, I have found this to be the case. There have been a few people over the last couple of years who have suggested otherwise, but I haven't so far found their theories to be plausible. Not to say that isn't so.

However, there are some 'internal' CV mappings which are 'invisible' to us, both on uploading and subsequently, and some of them give 'surprising' results.