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-dancerNote 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.
