i never paid much attention but today I'm on a mission and I'm searching for my images on the IS/getty site.  I'm finding tons of weird stuff. 
for instance, a search of 'madison square garden' produces this:

http://www.istockphoto.com/photos/madison-square-garden?excludenudity=true&page=1&phrase=madison%20square%20garden&sort=newest
is it possible that so many people either intentionally or unintentially used the keyword 'madison square garden' for their dog and vegetable gardens?
is there no quality control?

i never paid much attention but today I'm on a mission and I'm searching for my images on the IS/getty site.  I'm finding tons of weird stuff. 
for instance, a search of 'madison square garden' produces this:

http://www.istockphoto.com/photos/madison-square-garden?excludenudity=true&page=1&phrase=madison%20square%20garden&sort=newest
is it possible that so many people either intentionally or unintentially used the keyword 'madison square garden' for their dog and vegetable gardens?
is there no quality control?

I don't know except it has garden in it? Sounds like a flawed search not spam.

It's not the search, and not necessarily spam.
I clicked on a totally egregious file and found 'Madison Square Garden" in the keywords; but as all the other keywords were clean, I can say with 99.99% certainty that it is the nightmare scenario whereby the 'unification' is making lots of keywords go haywire.
I have found that important keywords are disappearing from my files and either being replaced by totally irrelevant keywords or irrelevant keywords are just mysteriously appearing.
I and many others have been complaining about this for months now on their keyword/search forum, and nothing 'seems' to be happening, and no-one official seems to give a d*mn.
It's to do with iS's and Getty's CV having diverged and they're having to unify them.

I wrote to support about one of my files in particular, on the grounds that we now cannot change keywords, and I wanted my keyword restored and the false one removed (with proof from DM that I had put the correct keyword and not the wrong one, I don't know if that still holds) and was told that they had no access to the file to change it.

One of the main reasons I haven't uploaded there for over six months.

Quote from: ShadySue on February 12, 2017, 16:06

It's not the search, and not necessarily spam.
I clicked on a totally egrecious file and found 'Madison Square Garden" in the keywords; but as all the other keywords were clean, I can say with 99.99% certainty that it is the nightmare scenario whereby the 'unification' is making lots of keywords go haywire.
I have found that important keywords are disappearing from my files and either being replaced by totally irrelevant keywords or irrelevant keywords are just mysteriously appearing.
I and many others have been complaining about this for months now on their keyword/search forum, and nothing 'seems' to be happening, and no-one official seems to give a d*mn.
It's to do with iS's and Getty's CV having diverged and they're having to unify them.

I wrote to support about one of my files in particular, on the grounds that we now cannot change keywords, and I wanted my keyword restored and the false one removed (with proof from DM that I had put the correct keyword and not the wrong one, I don't know if that still hold) and was told that they had no access to the file to change it.

One of the main reasons I haven't uploaded there for over six months.

Wow. This is so disturbing. I too have found completely irrelevant keywords in some of my files. Any way to change them after they've been upload and accepted?

No, they prevented us from being able to do that, and have allegedly blocked access to the files to support also.

The only possibly effective thing you can do, and I'm not promising, is to write on the Keywording forum giving some of your own examples. (posting other peoples' is against forum rules)

The keyword team, assuming they're the same, are pretty decent people, honestly; however, it seems that more and more their hands are being tied by Getty.

Except that he probably keyword 'garden' and 'the system' at some point (not necessarily at upload) changed garden to MSG.

the whole thing is so dumb. and frustrating.  today I'm uploading a batch from a historic notable cemetery in philadelpha called Laurel Hill Cemetery.  I can't include the keyword 'laurel hill cemetery' and my only choices for 'laurel hill' are a basketball player and some other person.

I'm not sure why so many people are uploading (or seem to be highly anxious to upload) at the moment, to be honest.

The number of problems over the past months with recently uploaded files, apparently even worse now; and not being able to take even the simplest step of deactivating an reuploading; people with accepted files in limbo for weeks/months, corrupted files, lack of necessary keywords (I've had some on request for a year now) ... all of these seem to be unimportant - they've been going on for long enough without fixes.

That's even before considering that our files could sell for "as low as 2c / 28c".