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Author Topic: Terrible search engine!  (Read 14878 times)

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lagereek

« on: February 18, 2010, 12:35 »
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I mean frankly, I havent seen anything like it!  I just punched in " engineer and industry"  what do I get?  1st page, well a few but the next 3 pages are full of the same stereotyped oldish guy posing in a suit with a plastic hard-hat and the model doesnt even look the part.
Jeez!  no wonder they dont sell????  and this is in two gigantic search categories.


« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2010, 12:58 »
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You think that's bad? Try a search on 'air travel' if you really want a laugh.

« Reply #2 on: February 18, 2010, 13:15 »
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You think that's bad? Try a search on 'air travel' if you really want a laugh.

yeah the air travel section got pretty jacked up when Sharply_done removed all his shots .. I'd say he owns the market on awesome plane shots  ;D

vonkara

« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2010, 13:20 »
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Yea air travel is laughable...

« Reply #4 on: February 18, 2010, 13:32 »
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is it just me or does DT weight new images quite heavily now in the best match search.  The first page is almost totally full of one illustration of the same airplane.
« Last Edit: February 18, 2010, 13:34 by leaf »

« Reply #5 on: February 18, 2010, 13:40 »
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I don't think anything can beat Fotolia's search engine. They must have one of the most pathetic search engines in the history of stock photography.
If you search for 'military helicopter' on German Fotolia (Kampfhubschrauber), you'll see mostly pictures of dogs, about 1 helicopter per page, occasionaly other aircrafts. On page 7 of the results flowers start to dominate. ;D

They did improve a little bit though. Some time ago when you searched for major cities you got all sorts of funny results.

Anyway, some of my files cannot be found at all with most important keywords...

« Reply #6 on: February 18, 2010, 13:54 »
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yeah the air travel section got pretty jacked up when Sharply_done removed all his shots .. I'd say he owns the market on awesome plane shots  ;D

Gee, thanks for pointing that out ... not!

Before going exclusive I regularly tracked my market share and penetration on the big agencies - DT was by far my lowest score, and no matter what I did I couldn't bring up my sales to what they should have been. I even got into a bit of trouble for experimenting with various tactics to improve my search placement. Things are much easier now that I'm at a place with an easy-to-work search engine.

lagereek

« Reply #7 on: February 18, 2010, 14:15 »
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Expecting buyers to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant material is down and out unprofessional. I dont get it?  why dont they do something about i?
Get some computer gurus in and let the sort it out.

« Reply #8 on: February 18, 2010, 14:25 »
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Expecting buyers to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant material is down and out unprofessional. I dont get it?  why dont they do something about i?
...
I think it's a principle at DT to 'share the wealth' among as many contributors as possible, and the way they do this is to weight the exposure any individual contributor gets. This explains, in my mind at least, why so many 'low ball' contributors are happy with their performance on DT.

« Reply #9 on: February 18, 2010, 14:25 »
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is it just me or does DT weight new images quite heavily now in the best match search.  The first page is almost totally full of one illustration of the same airplane.

Look for Frankfurt. A page of cars. Annoying.

vonkara

« Reply #10 on: February 18, 2010, 15:50 »
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I think it's a principle at DT to 'share the wealth' among as many contributors as possible, and the way they do this is to weight the exposure any individual contributor gets. This explains, in my mind at least, why so many 'low ball' contributors are happy with their performance on DT.

That's true, and apply also to Shutterstock with newest images up front. Dreamstime also have too low acceptance standard IMO
« Last Edit: February 18, 2010, 15:58 by Vonkara »

lagereek

« Reply #11 on: February 18, 2010, 16:08 »
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Expecting buyers to wade through pages and pages of irrelevant material is down and out unprofessional. I dont get it?  why dont they do something about i?
...
I think it's a principle at DT to 'share the wealth' among as many contributors as possible, and the way they do this is to weight the exposure any individual contributor gets. This explains, in my mind at least, why so many 'low ball' contributors are happy with their performance on DT.


Share the wealth??  bloody hell, are we down to socialism here?  silly me, for 20 years Ive thought stock photography was a commercial enterprise. Never realized it was a share-equal-charity.
As it happens I think youre right.

best. Christian

« Reply #12 on: February 18, 2010, 16:18 »
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Did you tried different result sorting. If you sort by downloads you will get idea what actually sells instead of what their engine thinks is relevant.

vonkara

« Reply #13 on: February 18, 2010, 16:19 »
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Share the wealth??  bloody hell, are we down to socialism here?  silly me, for 20 years Ive thought stock photography was a commercial enterprise. Never realized it was a share-equal-charity.
As it happens I think youre right.

best. Christian

Dreamstime do a rotation between contributors for the first pages results. Your acceptance ratio also play a role in your search placement, what I always find ridiculous. Selling performance/file should be the main popularity search. It work well either at Istock and Shutterstock

lagereek

« Reply #14 on: February 18, 2010, 17:11 »
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Agree!  still, Ive yet to come across a search that really works. IS, is all down to when they decide to change their best match, which can have fatal results.  SS, the popularity-search in fact works best but ofcourse youll see the same shots almost all the time. The Getty search allowing few conceptual keywords is just laughable.
Must be a hellish job constructing a search to satisfy all. Then again an agencies search is the most vital factor for buyers to find the right stuff and it really surprise me that more effort isnt going into it.
Buyers, designers, ad-people will spend on average, 3 to 4 pages of looking and if they cant find it, they move on, simple as that. So if 2 pages are full of irrelevant garbage the sale is a gonner.
All these Micro searches seem to be constructed for people/buyers that can sit for hours on end searching with a cig, cups of coffee, beers and a bit of whiskey that 12 hours later when they finally found it, theyre so pissed they forgot what they were searching for in the first place.

well, you know, bit over the top perhaps but Im sure Im pretty close.

« Reply #15 on: February 18, 2010, 18:34 »
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When I'm buying photos, I only search sorted by "Newest First". If I can't find what I need fairly quickly, then I switch my sort order to "Most Downloads". It seems to work out OK for me.

« Reply #16 on: February 18, 2010, 19:23 »
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Imagine trying to run a big store without actually knowing what products you have on the shelves:  which ones are good, which are junk, which are actually mislabelled and in the wrong boxes... 


 

« Reply #17 on: February 18, 2010, 20:40 »
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Even if you can get your suppliers to label things correctly going forward, it's still a pretty daunting task to get everything in order...

« Reply #18 on: February 18, 2010, 21:07 »
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Not only that, but you start to realize some of your suppliers have been deliberately mislabelling since day one... and meanwhile, a new store has opened down the street, run by a guy who has learned from your mistakes...

« Reply #19 on: February 18, 2010, 21:48 »
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I wonder why somebody expect to find what they think about just based on two keywords? There are millions of images to search. Then probably couple thousands for each term.

lagereek

« Reply #20 on: February 19, 2010, 05:09 »
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Acceptance rate is another thing, better they are rigorous then too easy going and personally I dont want to see pages clogged up with rubbish only for the sake of it.

Bad search mechanism however is major trouble weather the shot is good or bad! customers/buyers get fed up. I know, I work with designers, ad-agencies all the time. They havent got the time for this and thereby classify the agency as a waste of time.

« Reply #21 on: February 19, 2010, 09:15 »
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You can get much better results if you change the match order to "downloads" or even "upload date". DT is an image-centered site while IS is a contributor centered site. Their best match is made for exclusives, that's why I always start at page 5 and down. At DT at least, you can change the match algorithm easily. It's just one click.

« Reply #22 on: February 19, 2010, 09:24 »
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My complaint about DT engine is the concentration of similar images by the same series in one page.  Sometimes you can have more than 50% of the images from the same series.  I think they should distribute results more evenly, because I suppose that a buyer, if seeing a few pics that look interesting, will choose them and then will see its similars.  The way they do makes one think there is not a big variety.

DT has a good thing of using description and title also, so it increases relevance.  On the other side, it is bad that they don't accept composed keywords, I think they are very helpful, and do not get confused with spam, like mentioned in another thread.

Changing sort mode is ok, but I wonder how many buyers never change the default?  See the search terms, they are very basic, so not all buyers do sophisticated searches and use options, perhaps only a few do.

« Reply #23 on: February 19, 2010, 09:57 »
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Yes the DT search engine is realy not that great.

 I feel the IS search engine is by far the best, except that you cannot exclude the exclusive content. If you could it would be awesome for the buyer. But the exclusives would not like that and I can understand them  :)
Behind IS there is a huge gap and I know that, because I am regulary searching for images also to license them.

FT, DT and the others could do so much better if they would just have a better search engine.

The problem with DT is, yes you can sort differently very fast, but you want relevancy and relevancy is nowhere good except at IS, because at IS relevancy is so closely tied in what buyers bought after they searched specific keywords.


WarrenPrice

« Reply #24 on: February 19, 2010, 11:44 »
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If you are unhappy with the DT search engine now, just try posting this thread on their forum.  It CAN get worse.   :'(


 

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