MicrostockGroup

They split up the keywords and put them in alphabetical order.

And somebody can flag your keywords - he will not see GOLD or GATE in your photo...

They don't "do" compound keywords and you can use space, comma, semicolon as delimiters.  Frankly I think this is by far the simplest most effective and sensible way to handle keywords.  Downside is they don't automatically handle plurals.  It doesn't matter if someone flags them as long as the flag isn't justified.

Dt's system is the opposite of disambiguation.

I always thought DA is going to be the only way to deliver the best possible search results in the future.

Istocks system could have been the best, but the way they have done it it both encourages and rewards people for misdisambiguating and makes search a pain. Just another of the areas where Istock could have killed their competition but instead didn't. I guess that is one less thing I'll have to worry about in a few days.

That's a good point, I hadn't really thought of it that way.  I guess I'm not that concerned.  I'm more concerned about some of the more obscure places I shoot though, which are only known by name to regional people.  I guess they probably aren't a huge portion of the sales, but they are something.  One example is this place shown below, for instance.  It is a park around here called "Russian Ridge."  So I now have the keyword 'russian' in there, which definitely makes me look like a keyword spammer



I suppose I could avoid looking like a spammer by putting "taken at Russian Ridge" or something in the description, and sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.  I'm never sure if the exact location might put off some buyers who are looking for the "anonymous typical California grassland".  Thoughts?

If someone does a search for Golden Gate bridge they will find your image as long as golden, gate and bridge are in the keywords. They'll also see your image if they search for golden bridge or golden gate which means in an international market where a buyer might not know the full name of the bridge, they still have a fair chance of finding it. It's not really a bad approach. The only issue is when people who don't know the subtlety of the english language flag words like golden when it's an image of a bridge. You just have to learn to ignore those flags.
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I have "Roland Garros" in the description of a clay tennis court ("...the type of court use din Roland Garros"). It is found in a search, but if it is not a keyword, it ends up in the end of a search (try searching for Roland Garros, non-editorial, mine is the last, and many others are not RG in any way).

I've seen people putting all famous tennis tournaments in the keywords even if the image does not apply at all (Wimbledon is grass, not clay). That's spamming for me.

As for the composite keywords, I think it would be smart to any site to allow them for relevance purposes. DT in particular uses title and description to set relevancem what is a good idea too.