Author Topic: IS Search engine (Read 7541 times)

berryspun · « **on:** October 16, 2006, 23:47 »

On the "Current Search Issues" topic, page 28, I found an interesting comment made by qingwa, which would favor first the 5-star rating as first choice in the searches. What do you think? Here is the comment:

"Just noticed that rating appear to still play a significant part in determining best match. I searched on "orchid" and sorted by age to see what was new. My newest file appears on the 20th spot of the first page. If you search on "orchid" by best match, you find that same image shows up at number 12 on the first page. Why is that? I did notice that all the images before it have a least one 5 camera rating.
One thing that is very interesting is there is a newer file in the age sort that has a download, that does not show up until page 14 of the best match sort. I could not understand why this would be, newer then mine, and it has a download, so it should be a better match I would think. After some investigation, I realized that all the images on the proceeding 13 pages have one thing in common, they all have a rating of 5. On page 14, you start with images that have no rating, but are newest. I would conclude the best match is sorting in something like the following order: Matching tag>rating of 5, sorted newest first> no rating, newest first. Maybe other tags sort differently, but I'm not sure how else to interpret these results.
Jim"

maunger · « **Reply #1 on:** October 17, 2006, 07:07 »

Berryspun, I saw that same posting and after having an image at the front of the search on 'best match' yesterday only to see it completely disappear and at the risk of getting in trouble, i sent this note to my IS creative network this morning... y'all are free to try it if you'd like (yes i'm spamming)

Hi y'all

would you please indulge me for a bit? To tell you the truth right up front, i'm asking for a favor - to have you rate an image for me - if you don't want to take the time, that's fine you can stop reading and delete.

There's been lots of discussion about the new "best match" searches on the forums. Yesterday, I had an image that is new suddenly start selling a ton... so i went and did a search and low and behold, if you did a 'best match' search for "palm tree" it was on the first page! So, i was enjoying the new found sales on an image (one that is also selling pretty well on other sites too so it was good to see it pop up here too).

Anyway, I changed ONE tiny little keyword yesterday afternoon and now it has dropped off the chart on any search (and so have the downloads).

Someone this morning suggested that ratings are now playing a part in Best Match (and they probably have all along too) but he said he checked his image and since it had no ratings it wasn't appearing until after all the images that had ratings... well guess what, my image doesn't have any ratings either... so I thought, maybe it would change things and get my image back toward the front if I had some ratings.

here's the url:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2117180

I've not asked my CN to do anything like this before and I honestly don't blame you if you don't want to do it, but if you would, would you please go to this image and rate it?

I'll post any changes here.

admart01 · « **Reply #2 on:** October 17, 2006, 11:31 »

So here's an interesting connection... I just viewed my portfolio (looking to see if my new keywords were accepted -- not yet) and notices that the usual display order was different. Connecting it to this thread, the photos that have been reviewed show up before those with 0 reviews. I never did understand how the sort order worked before but this is a defineate change.

CJPhoto · « **Reply #3 on:** October 17, 2006, 11:37 »

I dont like ratings as it is very subjective and prone to abuse. In addtion, unless the majority of photos get rated, it is not a meaning piece of info. Espeically as there is no way to get your images rated other than luck or asking your friends to do (open to abuse).

StockXpert also has ratings which can be searched by specifically (I dont think they are tied into the best match criteria).

GeoPappas · « **Reply #4 on:** October 17, 2006, 12:29 »

Quote from: CJPhoto on October 17, 2006, 11:37

StockXpert also has ratings which can be searched by specifically (I dont think they are tied into the best match criteria).

FYI: StockXpert doesn't have a Best Match sort order.

Freezingpictures · « **Reply #5 on:** October 18, 2006, 06:12 »

Tell us how it turned out...

Quote from: maunger on October 17, 2006, 07:07

Berryspun, I saw that same posting and after having an image at the front of the search on 'best match' yesterday only to see it completely disappear and at the risk of getting in trouble, i sent this note to my IS creative network this morning... y'all are free to try it if you'd like (yes i'm spamming)

Hi y'all

would you please indulge me for a bit? To tell you the truth right up front, i'm asking for a favor - to have you rate an image for me - if you don't want to take the time, that's fine you can stop reading and delete.

There's been lots of discussion about the new "best match" searches on the forums. Yesterday, I had an image that is new suddenly start selling a ton... so i went and did a search and low and behold, if you did a 'best match' search for "palm tree" it was on the first page! So, i was enjoying the new found sales on an image (one that is also selling pretty well on other sites too so it was good to see it pop up here too).

Anyway, I changed ONE tiny little keyword yesterday afternoon and now it has dropped off the chart on any search (and so have the downloads).

Someone this morning suggested that ratings are now playing a part in Best Match (and they probably have all along too) but he said he checked his image and since it had no ratings it wasn't appearing until after all the images that had ratings... well guess what, my image doesn't have any ratings either... so I thought, maybe it would change things and get my image back toward the front if I had some ratings.

here's the url:
http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup.php?id=2117180

I've not asked my CN to do anything like this before and I honestly don't blame you if you don't want to do it, but if you would, would you please go to this image and rate it?

I'll post any changes here.

pixelbrat · « **Reply #6 on:** October 18, 2006, 20:11 »

I don't know if you guys saw the post by Bitter tonight about the Best Match changing again - and who could blame you since the thread is 610 posts long - but he gave no indication as to what the new criteria would be. Here's the page, near the middle.

http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=40930&page=31

Of course, give it a few days and they'll change it again, I'm sure.

dbvirago · « **Reply #7 on:** October 18, 2006, 20:20 »

Tried to do a search of one of mine to see where it came up. Put in half a dozen keywords to narrow it down and got 700,000+ results. Then I see that the search engine put an 'or' in between all the words. Unless you type in the 'and' between each keyword, it assumes or. So the more you try to narrow the scope, the more ambiguous the results.

pixelbrat · « **Reply #8 on:** October 18, 2006, 20:25 »

I tried playing with it tonight on my own shots and got too frustrated to keep going. What I really don't understand is seeing photos show up that don't have ANY of the words I searched on listed in the keywords. How in the heck does that work?

I keep telling myself to just stay away from there until they get this whole mess sorted out but it's just so hard to look away from a train wreck.

yingyang0 · « **Reply #9 on:** October 18, 2006, 20:54 »

Quote from: pixelbrat on October 18, 2006, 20:25

What I really don't understand is seeing photos show up that don't have ANY of the words I searched on listed in the keywords. How in the heck does that work? I keep telling myself to just stay away from there until they get this whole mess sorted out but it's just so hard to look away from a train wreck.

This system will only work when all the files have been fixed. Untill then any ambiguous keyword maps to all possible meanings, so that's how you get photos that don't have the keyword in it.

They're trying to get a system close to Getty without hiring the people neccessary to just set all teh keywords themselves.

maunger · « **Reply #10 on:** October 19, 2006, 11:44 »

After Bitter announced a new version of best match last night (wed evening), i posted this note this morning on IS (starting with his post in the

Quote

block (which won't work right here on yahoo but you get the point):

Quote
Posted By bitter:
There is a new version of Best Match that is being launched in the next 30 minutes. I think you'll be pleased with the new results. I also think you'll find that it's a marked improvement over the old Best Match. Comments are welcome.

You likely won't see the full results until after midnight MST as the caches are cleared. (That's about 6 hours from this post)

Ok, here's my feedback on the "best match" i see today

I'm looking at one search at this point since I've been watching it since Monday when one of my images was in the first 20 images and got 8 DLs in the 12 or so hours it was on the front page on Monday. The search was on "palm tree"

Monday, my image was #18 on the search
Tuesday thru the new version announced by Bitter, my image wasn't in the first 1000 (and got no downloads)
After the new best match, my image is #284 (which isn't bad out of over 4000 images with "palm tree")

Comments on what i see tho:
#1 - The number one (as far as i know) most downloaded beach image on IS is shown as #2 which is good. However, the artist of that image also has 5 other images on the first page (of 40 displayed). (also has 3 images on page 2 - making 8 images in the top 80) - his image is also in the top 30 most downloaded in the past 3 months

#2 - another artist has 6 images on the first page of 40. (also 4 images on page 2 - 10 in top 80) (also has 8 on page 3 making 18 in the top 120) (also has 4 on page 4 - total 22 in top 160 images for "palm tree")

interesting side note (which is a topic all to itself!) - this same artist has at least 4 images in the "Highest Rated Files (last week)" images list... is there a connection?

#3 Another artist has 3 images on the front page -- yet another artist has 3 images in first 2 pages.

#4 - it appears that (at least on the first several pages of the search i didn't go on forever) only images with ratings can appear at the beginning of a best match -- random checking on the first 6 pages shows every image seems to have at least one rating.

#5 - i didn't check all the images, but there's a mix of exclusive and non-exclusive photogs on the first page

#6 - in the first 6 pages, one artist has 4 very similar images of a girl lying on the grass with a wine glass and a palm tree in the background.

#7 - searching for 'palm and tree' gives about 70% of the same images as "palm tree" the phrase.

#8 - i notice there's this parameter on the URL (not sure if it was there before so i don't know if it is new) "&Cache=46137854" -- so maybe some searches are being cached to improve speed (which would be good) - don't know if that would impact best match at all just thought it was interesting

#9 - a random selection of 8 images showed that 6 were uploaded in the last 3 months (note tho it is hard to pick randomly without looking at download numbers - if you see a flame for example, odds are it is an older image (especially with the subject matter and the volume of images that are tropical). Not a scientific result i'm sure.

So, to summarize, at least in this one search, way too many images done by the same artists are getting to the front page to be "fair" to the others and if you don't have any ratings on an image, you don't get to the front.

I'm not saying that is true for all searches, but it is interesting.

CJPhoto · « **Reply #11 on:** October 19, 2006, 11:59 »

Maunger - so have you figured it out. You now have enough rating (dont you?) so that doesn't seem to be influencing the result. Exclusivity also isn't influencing the result. Do they have palm tree as a category (do you?)

Maybe it actually thinks these photos are the best match? and these photographers are lucky to have the lucky combination that picks that up.