http://naturetravels.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/what%E2%80%99s-the-difference-between-a-moose-and-an-elk/

 

I think AJT and Cascoly need a lot of support since they are the quiet unsung heros who's hosting free search engines. In fact a huge amount of the network's success and "happy secure we matter and this proves it" feeling comes from these search engines.

+50 on this thread!

I think they both need a visual overhaul and perhaps a little help policing images. For instance a small "voting" system on images would help immensely.

Lets say I have "rat" images on one of the search engines and I find they are crowded out by pictures that are obviously "mice" or worse "hamsters". I could probably give a little "x" vote on a button that pops up on hover, thus adding images to a queue for them to quickly look at. So an example would be they would check out their "queue" and see the hamster with the prompt "RAT?" beside it. They could then do a YES or NO action.

(edit - giving them even less work, I could actually extend the voting system into Symbiostock by way of a plugin, delegeting the work to everyone. So with a large number of "agreed" votes the image would be taken off from the given search)

It saves them from having to police a HUGE network of 100,000, of images one by one. Obviously this could end up being a big community effort and the end result is the critics are definitely wrong when they say Symbiostock would be full of noise.

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Second they definitely need some ways to profit. There are plenty of ways to do this, either by paid inclusion or even benefiting 3rd parties by providing site info. Its a broad subject.

There's lots of ways search engines profit from being...search engines. I think we can probably address those things - search accuracy / integrity and getting them something for their work.

There's lots of ways search engines profit from being...search engines. I think we can probably address those things - search accuracy / integrity and getting them something for their work.

+50

I 100% support that idea, and also your edited-in suggestion of having some kind of voting system from within the SYS network.

All of us probably are carrying some spammy keywords with our images. I've been finding 'em in my stuff these last few weeks as I've Yoasted my way through hundreds of images keyworded years ago. Often too fast, copying and pasting lists of keywords from other images that maybe weren't exactly the same but got keyworded alike anyway.

Even if we don't intend to commit keyword spam, it's easy to do. Just gotta try to winnow the spam out.

One way to freely update the search engine's accuracy is to have humans fill out a special captcha in different places (like sign-in)

Basically once a queue begins to be formed you have this on everyone's sites:

symbiostock captcha:

"please choose the keyword which does not describe this image"

<thumbnail image>

fur, cute, brown, teen, kitten

If its a picture of a cat, the user would click the word "teen" or whatever.

Its actually an unknown captcha system so it could register CORRECT either way and let the viewer through.

One "advantage"of having to re upload most of my images is that I can now keyword in phrases instead of singe words , for instance cavalier king charles spaniel, singlely there is no king but it is a valid keyword.  Descriptions are also searched and as someone mentioned tne other day they were looking for bird and some of my cat pictures came up, valid due to description

It would be good to have some kind of alert system for keywords that bare no relation to the images though and I would support this, especially as the network grows with people who have no experience with stock, better than blocking them

A question for Leo - someone mentioned turning off the partial word search feature, giving an example that a search on Asian would also return Caucasian. What governs the returns on a network search?  Is it the setting on the network partner or would the original site search overrule the settings on the partner site?

There is no easy solution.


And maybe the major players are major because they are keyword stuffing.   

Why vote, why not just a notification system?   That way if you find a lot of images coming up that when you check the description as well and you consider they are still wrong and will damage your searches just exclude that site from the results ?   I do not know if they come up in the symbiostock.info network results but would not in your own.

Leo's link to the elk/moose article proves that the search results for "elk" are actually very good and accurate since we never know WHO will do the search.
In addition to that, every SYS site owner has a fundamental interest in accurate keywords because he/she is responsible for the success of his/her website. If there are lots of inapplicable keywords to be found, visitors will probably avoid the site in the future.

Bottom line, I don't see a need for moderation of textual content.

There are 2 things already built into the base theme that could help clean up the search results.

• Weighting results using the internal rating system already built into the base theme - ie: using the best work from each portfolio.
  
  
• Favouring search results to match specialities - there is already a weighted keyword option in the base theme that could be exploited.

lots of topics to address:

first, I don't want to make any decisions about which keywords are correct and which not (see the thread I started earlier about 'keyword spam', since we'll all disagree about where to draw the line.

there's no easy way to notify site owners of 'glagged' keywords since there's no direct way to contact them; each site decides whether to have a public email somewhere on their site.  the email in the symbiocard is (rightly) encrypted

regarding the examples - I agree that a beach in Bermuda should not have Hawaii or Riviera as keywords; but I don't see a problem with moose,elk & deer --  there are 2 major viewpoints - first is to make the description & keywords as accurate as possible - precise and scientific.  however, searchers are NOT necessarily that precise, or even knowledgable.  if someone is searching for an elk, they might be able to use a moose just as easily; and many people don't know the difference between an ape & a monkey.  so my personal rule is to have the description be as accurate as possible, using scientific names only when I am positive of the identification; but I am looser when it comes to keywording

another source of search confusion is if the engine uses descriptions -- while accurate, descriptions may not actually describe what's in the picture -- eg, there's a perfectly appropriate description of a cat 'thnking  about catching a bird' -- fine description, but it will appear if 'bird' is searched using the description

right now, I use keywords only in my search engine, but i'm playing with various ways to weight the search.  we can handle most searches now, since a few words will bring up a manageable set of results; but something stronger will be needed as we grow.  (even the most common keywords produce greatly reduced results when combined.)

another option is condensing results by combining similars -- for 'red food' this reduces the results from 1200 to 600 and the user can click on the image to see similar; 'beautiful woman' reduces 3500 to about 750 using this very crude filter

i'm always interested in other ideas for searching

steve