I thought I would open this up for discussion after all the conversations I have had with graphic designers, advertisers and publishers who explained how they like to search when using keywords only. Seeing how you guys think about this could help us as well bc we are relying on your user generated keywords so we need to make them work for our search algo and fit for what we are learning from how buyers/people are searching on Cutcaster and how they like to search using keywords.
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as always, john, your interest is appreciated, but this time i really think you have it backwards - you and all the other MS are the ones who have actual data about what people use to search, so making that info avaialble would be immensely helpful.

that said, i think the simple answer is "all the above" - a system has to flexible enough to handle all kinds of queries.  the way an indivdual uses a search string is dependent on their age & experience - older [in both senses] users are more likely to have grown up with the need for booleans and other special characters [unix search strings?]   while newer folks started with google and other much more flexible formats.

the best solution is a simple search up front, combined with 'advanced' features avaialble for those interested -- the ebay and google systems are both reasonable solutions

s

Although this doesn't quite address your question, if I was a buyer I'd be more interested in search speed than anything else. A system that allowed me to get a lot of relatively pertinent search results so that I could quickly/easily add them to ad-hoc lightboxes with sticky and customizable thumbnail sizes might make it very easy to find the best image to suit my needs.

I thought I would open this up for discussion after all the conversations I have had with graphic designers, advertisers and publishers who explained how they like to search when using keywords only. Seeing how you guys think about this could help us as well bc we are relying on your user generated keywords so we need to make them work for our search algo and fit for what we are learning from how buyers/people are searching on Cutcaster and how they like to search using keywords.
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What are other ways that people will search using keywords?

For what it's worth, I wrote an article about keyword strategy a while ago. Keywords used can be seen on sold photos on Dreamstime, and to my surprise, about half of the sales went without keywords. That means that visual search plays an important role, and keywords aren't the full story. Often, not more than 2 simple keywords are used. To facilitate visual search, it would be important to add thumbs of "similar photos" and "more photos from this photog's portfolio" like Dreamstime does.

Great subject.

 I just sent an inquiry to Istock because when you search my images without Parenthesises " " you do not get my images on all combinations. The weird part is they don't all work the same.

 Here is an example image # 7561606 at Istock. If you punch in key words asian and remote control you do not get my image even though both these key words are included in my key wording. However if you punch in asian and " remote control " you get my image as well as many others that didn't appear before.

 I sent a message and they said I had to check the box that popped up to make it clear that I meant remote control electronic device then re-click and the images would appear. Of coarse I tried that before I sent them a message and it didn't work, that was all they offered.

Try it out on the image number I gave you. This part is frustrating because if I was a buyer I would not think I would have to use parenthesises to show all the selections. I would call this a glitch but then I don't completely understand the Istock search engine.

 I can use the same image and punch in the keywords asian and television and the image pops up in the search without any parenthesises so it's hard to see a pattern. I thought maybe parenthesises when the key word is two words like remote control but the same problem occurs sometimes with just single words as well. If someone can tell me why I have to add Italics to only certain words at Istock and if the customers are being told about this I would really love the help.

Thanks,
AVAVA