MicrostockGroup

Can someone tell me when the change happened? I didn't notice it...

I wish I could say I love it but my sales have reduced loads since so im not a fan but im confident things will change

why?

Well my sales died at iStock recently, while people cheer all the time they have BMEs. Doesn't seem a tradition to me.

It seems the Search engine changed again, for the worse...

Yap. Happy little whiner is doing a happy dance right now, photoshopping like crazy to get back on track.

Yeah.... for the worse this time.
So what? Now it is time to write a new topic again: "I hate the new DT search engine"

The engine gets tweaked VERY often. I assure you that by doing it we try to 1. acomodate the buyers needs 2. maximize all contributors earnings (not just a part, newer or older).
I stress "try", it's a numbers game in the end and no sorting is perfect.

The default sorting was changed as another part of our update, not because we got these hate and love threads (although we do care about them). The relevancy got tweaked in the meantime as usual. No matter the outcome, the revenue change shouldn't be dramatical for users with significant portfolios (>100 images, more relevant for hundreds). A contributor with just a couple images online may experience a dramatic change, we can't really do this properly unless a certain db. exposure is met.

The relevance issue can only be solved fundamentally by contributor-assigned relevance weight to keywords, like by ordering keywords in order of importance, the most important ones first. When I was contributing to the Open Source Coppermine keywords module, an algorithm like that showed to slow down searches exponentially, so perhaps it's not feasable in a db of 5M, soon 10M.

A compromise could be to (a) limit the N of keywords drastically (who needs 80?) or (b) to distinguish between essential and extra keywords, the essential ones being the first 10 or 15 in the IPTC. But it's probably unfeasible to readdress a db of 5M, let alone that contributors won't be prepared to do it.

Relevance is further complicated by the fact that buyers only use 1 or 2 keywords to search, then revert to visual search, - and by the fact that textual keywords are a poor way to describe the mood or the concept of an image.

In this respect, categories are helpful to describe the essentials of an image, and the search option is already there to search within categories - but I doubt whether many buyers use this feature.

Rekeywording and retitling my older images, I noticed that one can't change categories. Reading between the lines of admins on the DT forum, I bet that categories are also used to determine relevance, as well as repeat keywords in title and description. And also that less keywords is better, since it has been stressed repeatedly that irrelevant keywords are bad for search result ranks.

Search engine at DT has changed back to "Relevancy" as default yesterday 

If you read the reply from Achilles the reason to change back was due to "Buyers complained". it is not because of contributors interests....

Ok, feedback or complaints, whatever. What I meant is for any stock photo business (or any other type business) it is people who pays to buy photos do they take seriously not contributors. On the other hand, DT changed search engine in March only because they want to push more sales. If not for seeing revenue decrease who would care to change the search default back?  Not blaming DT, if I run this business I would definitely do the same. Yes, as a contributor I can only keep shooting and uploading.

I totally agree, whatever. 
However in this particular case do you think that this changing search engine back to it was before was based on positive "feedback" from buyers?