MicrostockGroup

Exactly, in addition to the black businessmen you will also get all the buisnessmen wearing a black suit or against a black background or wearing a black tie, etc etc.  Input something vague in the search field and you will get something vague back.

I had this argument with Dreamstime; they would not allow geographic terms in my keywords and I told them they were essential for the identification of the animals with respect to location.  Do a search for tiger or Siberian Tiger; you will get thousands of zoo images.  Do a search for Primorski, Tiger, Russia and you will get mostly Tigers from the wild.

Another example, go a search for Eastern Great Tit (a bird) and you get thousands of images of pretty girls from the east or looking east or that have been  on a trip to the east, etc.  Do a search for Eastern Great Tit, Amur and you will get photos of a small bird with a colorful pale yellow belly.  But, DT will not allow the words Primorski, Russia or Amur in the keywords.

I, the seller, am screwed because the buyer can not find my work and the buyer is screwed because he/she must wade through junk to find the images

the searches are a problem in IS because it is not focused on the buyer at all. It is focused on pushing chosen higher value content and a bias towards exclusives. The buyer wants the best picture not IS margin grabs or its attempt to keep exclusives. Only educated (in IS systems) buyer find it easy.
What is disturbing to me is there seems to be looser standards for exclusive content. Multiple similar shots get in clogging the searches and at times happy snaps that would not make it in for independents - check out the critique forums. Some shots are poor to the point you shake your head and then hear "it is fine it got it". I know there are extremely good exclusives and I am not doubting that their content is good.

This all means worse and more expensive images first?

I respect tyour view but are you an exclusive and not a buyer to feel that way?

Sorry but that's a poor example. If you want to sell images of wildlife then it is absolutely unforgivable to not use the binomial nomenclature (Latin/Greek names) to identify them. If you want to sell an image of a Great Tit then you should have the words Parus major within your keywords __ which you don't. The location then becomes largely irrelevant as birds have a tendency to fly to different places but obviously their name remains the same. It also differentiates you as a professional supplier of wildlife images from the happy snapper at the zoo or in their garden. You could really do with improving your keywording. It is also essential to state what the subject is doing __ is the bird flying, perching, eating or what? Whenever I sell a wildlife image on DT the buyer ususally keywords the action and very often the Latin name.

+1

plus if someone enters a crappy search of one or two words, they will get stinky results for everything that has those two words. What did they expect? The search engine is not intuitive and doesn't know what someone wants, anymore than a computer can guess that you wanted it to do something else when you typed in a wrong command. GIGO

All the people pointing out that black is also black and there are black suits... have covered the whole problem that seems to get ignored every time this keyword and search engine riot breaks out in a new thread. Try walnut, is it wood, a tree, a color, a part holding a wall or something else?   

Words Have More Than One Meaning!

As for the theory of views, clicks and zooms which would rank the pictures for future searches, by how buyers looked at them. Alamy does that, using their top buyers, and people complain about the search there because it finds the words they searched for! I always ask, did you want it to find words you didn't search for somehow?

No search engine is going to work if the words and descriptions are full of irrelevant words and spam. NONE. No search will work when words have multiple meanings, it's language and impossible to know which meaning someone wants, except maybe with CV and we can all see how limiting that is, especially when the word we need, doesn't exist because they haven't added it or it's spelled differently in Canada than other places.

Yeah, when is the secret code book for IS keywords going to be published.

There's no pleasing anyone... that's my answer.

Point taken, understood, will revise my keywords

Search your name and see what happens. "[fname lname] photo" I was very surprised to see an avatar from a flying website my first (wow strange?) followed by istock, istock, mostphotos (my avatar?), 123rf, 123rf, (123RF is a closed account!), Imagekind (one photo account that I opened in 2005), iStock, private site, private site (a drivers webpage), icon gif from one of my websites, istock, another one of my websites (not the same one), Alamy logo from one of my websites... Not one BigStock on the front page. Kind of amusing.

I wonder why the Google Image search find avatars and gifs from my web pages, before it finds web images. And by the way, the IS images are the oldest uploads from my application set. All very odd. Yes, 123RF apparently has the best identification for getting picked up by the Google Image search for artists name.

Searching for some of my subjects by drivers name picasaweb.google.com and flickr come up and nothing on my websites in the first page.

I guess I'd better work on that? 

http://www.danheller.com/blog/posts/do-buyers-use-search-engines-more-than.html

For example, if only .1% of google searchers would actually license an image they found for a given search, the fact that the site itself gets hundreds of millions of searches a day, even the tiny .1% that might convert into buyers would still yield a higher total than what all the photo stock agencies yield...

...To use my site as strictly anecdotal evidence, I get 20,000-30,000 visitors a day, and of those who license images, only a small handful even knew that "stock photo agencies" existed in the first place.


If search results weren't lucrative, Google would have gone out of business a long time ago.  But if you think nobody uses Google to search for things to buy, then I completely understand why you feel only an agency can represent you.

That's a good point, but I've seen credit packages starting at $5, others start at $10. 123rf and Bigstock start at $15, even if they use this to buy one image, it's not a big amount. I've only seen Cutcaster allow individual purchases, without buying credits.