It's been taken down as it was apparently making an already treacle-slow site even slower, so their tech guys are trying to find ways of making it faster. Yet again, they don't seem to test things before launch, but at least this time they took the new features down quickly enough - I couldn't even see them when I tried, even before Kelvin's repost.

And yes, the 'crony search'. Another booster to my theory that they only want 'big hitters' as exclusives. It's their ball, but I wish they would just spell out their plans officially, then we'd all know where we stood. Note, it's not just that EP would get preferential placement, the buyers could exclude everything else.
OTOH, in Pollyanna mode, the buyers don't seem (from personal and most people's anecdotal evidence) to be using the 'New' slider much, so maybe they'll just stay with best match or Popular.

I'm sure they'll tell us that the buyers were hammering their door telling them to let them exclude indie and plebby exclusive files, but keep in the faux-exclusive ones, please.

I'm not playing this game very long but even I remember all the complaints from indies about being pushed into PP - guess what, not alone is PP now generating about 4 times the volume, the RPD is actually better

I see the end game as PP for indies, IS for a favoured few exclusives and other exclusive being * out of luck.

Also, EP must be part of a 'special deal' when they go headhunting.
This new contributor joined in July, has 386 files and 20 sales (OK, that's impressive for new uploads), is nevertheless exclusive (yes, with 20 sales) and all their files are EP.
http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=10434681
(Seems to have been ingested from Getty.)

I really hope that the EP filter will be hard to find, so that almost nobody will use it.

So you are suggesting that Editor's pick is a label that indicates "super secret getty deal" if it was slapped  across the entire portfolio? It's possible. An easy way to identify those loved more...

What I really don't get how they try to pretend that Getty is such a tiny outfit they cannot go over millions of files to pick the best content. When in reality Getty has a huge team of editors scouting through billions of files on flickr to find the best work. It would probably take that  team of very experienced editors just a few weeks to comb through the istock exclusive content, especially because the Vetta and agency collection already gave them an idea in which portfolios to look first.

I thought the remark about not being ready to find "the best handshake" spoke volumes of the low apprciation of the quality of the istock exclusive contributors.

It's important to remember when Getty communications mentions exclusive contributors, they don't mean the regular istock or getty contributors, but only the select few or their wholly owned content. Editors pick just makes it more visible, that is all.