iStock has a new app on Facebook for searching the collection - although I use the word search very loosely. The results are downright weird, generally putting very old images (from 2002 and 2003 in several of those I tried) on the first page.

In the iStock thread talking about this, some wag referred to the search order as Worst Match. I think that's being kind. Instead of presenting the best of the collection, or even new stuff, you get something that looks like a bad freebie image site. Perhaps they worked on this during the rock-paper-scissors tournament? There is a line at the bottom that says Product Catalog powered by SKUmatic so perhaps the problems are in part because of the tool they used to implement this?

There is the other issue about why they'd be doing this instead of fixing all the broken stuff with the main site. At this point I'm assuming that zoom and ratings went away because they switched to Getty code for the image pages and they're wondering if they can get away with leaving them out.

Even if the results were newest first vs. oldest first, you'd get something more useful. One wonders if anyone actually tried any test searches before making this live.