I have to add plurals??

Guess, I need to back in and add more keywords.

And spelling differences

Yes, Alamy search is totally literal and not intuitive at all. You must add plurals.

Yes, words together are weighted more heavily than just existing in the same keywords. No "doesn't do anything" and neither does the proposed [words here] brackets.

Yes the word order matters, first words are stronger than later words.

Alamy has yet again changed the search. First they dropped Description, then swapped around what showed, now they dropped Location.

Here's the simplest breakdown of keyword/searchrank. That doesn't explain how much Very High is more than High? 25%, 50%, 10%?

Essential = Very High
Main = High
Comprehensive = Medium
Caption = Low

According to Alamy... Word order and Proximity count. Same three words "Red Dog Walking" searched, would in theory show in this order in the search.

1) Red Dog Walking across bridge
2) Red haired man walking dog across bridge
3) Boat under walking bridge man rowing barking dog lady red dress

#1 has all three words in the right order, close together. #2 has all three words, wrong order, but close together #3 all three words, all wrong order, divided by many other words. All have the same three words. Add in that if the same three words are in different fields, it changes the order and power.

The search isn't as dumb as some people try to make it out to be. It finds what you search for. Good search words = better results. Yes it will find ALL words. What would someone want, to have the search NOT find words that the artist put in the keywords?

You have a really key, important, keyword, put it first in Essential. Have two or three words that go together? Put them together.

I honestly think the system at Alamy combats spam and penalizes people who pump up their keywords with fluff. I don't particularly care or watch CTR, because it's the result not the cause. There could be 10 other reasons why people aren't clicking images, besides keywords. Like composition, colors, contents, specifics, location, mistakes... and the photo isn't what they wanted. Blaming it all on keywords is a bit short sighted.

I have to add plurals??

Guess, I need to back in and add more keywords.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on July 08, 2013, 20:17

Yes, Alamy search is totally literal and not intuitive at all. You must add plurals.

It's perfectly logical/intuitive to search for e.g. 'horses' or 'four horses'.

Yes, but many other agencies automatically pluralize keywords, so if you keyword only 'horse' it will still match when someone searches for 'horses'. But not all do, so this isn't that unusual, just irksome.

SS search 'horses' also has a lot of single horse images;  DT is much better: most 'horses' have >1 horse; Alamy has some single horse images in a search for 'horses', and some quite surprising-until-you-see-the-caption images, but mostly multiple horses.

SS is one of those agencies that pluralizes keywords. (In fact, if you include both the singular and plural versions of a keyword when submitting, it automatically removes one of them.) DT, OTOH, does nothing special with plurals, IIRC.

But I can see what you mean about making it more difficult to search for exactly what you are looking for.