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Author Topic: Tag Searches Enhanced  (Read 4943 times)

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zymmetricaldotcom

« on: May 10, 2008, 11:45 »
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http://www.zymmetrical.com/info/newsid/129/

We've known from the start that our search and linguistics technology is a step up from the crowd, now we are bringing some new widgets online that take the behind-the-scenes workings a bit more forward into the users realm.

First step: 'Similar Searches' has been added to the bottom of the Tag Search Results screen, providing up to 30 related terms, and it's one smart little box.

Perform a search for a word or phrase, by entering it in our main search input, or clicking the tag link on any art page.  As an example, we'll use the word 'break'.

On your results page, http://www.zymmetrical.com/tag-search-results/tag/break/,  you will get the usual thumbnail results, and the following 'Similar Search' suggestions:

broken    break    coffee break    broke
breaking    broke-back    break-dancer


Note the key difference between this and many other agency searches: 'break' is matched to 'broke'. Seems logical enough, however this technique of word-stemming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stemming - breaking a word down into it's root form, and matching all it's variations), is not the easiest thing to pull off in computer programming - especially so on a dynamic image library. Fortunately, our coders are well-caffeinated and highly motivated.

For our Buyers, this means a big increase in search satisfaction and more importantly, finding the images they want.   In most stock search engines, typing in one variation of a word will -not- return results for the other, including pluralizations.  A customer should not miss seeing a file because they typed a slightly different form of a word.

For our Artists, this means simply, more sales and success.

Next step: disambiguation. "Did you mean: Turkey (bird) or Turkey (country)". Stay tuned.

p.s. this word-stemming technology we use works equally well across all 8 languages we support on the site. ;)
« Last Edit: May 10, 2008, 12:17 by zymmetricaldotcom »


« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2008, 20:34 »
0
Your search is now worse in my opinion because it's not intuitive. It looks like a bad attempt to copy iStock. If I enter a search term and hit search (or enter) before your system is done searching then it does nothing. Since your term search takes far too long to find the terms it seems like a lot of buyers will get irritated by the inability to search because that's not how a search function behaves anywhere else. Also, given the long search time it doesn't appear to be programmed correctly with efficient searching in mind.

If it was my investment I'd be more worried about building a library before trying to add advanced features. It's better to get a website out of beta and add new features down the road rather that try to come out of the gate with all the features that other competitors have (I personally don't find the term thing that you're copying from iStock very helpful). The first goal should be attracting buyers by having a larger library.


 

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