Phil Robinson Posted April 11, 2014 Share Posted April 11, 2014 There are some short words that the Alamy search engine doesn't pick up on, and I can sort of see why, but it is producing some unfortunate results / lack of results for some customer searches. In the last week or so there have been searches for "you are here city map" and "You Tube logo". Fairly easy in both cases to see what they wanted. Unfortunately, the search engine doesn't seem to register "you". Or "are". Or, indeed, "here". The search brings up 14,630 images - the same as just "city map" and I had to go through five pages before I found what I think they were looking for. The search for "You Tube logo" gets 790 results, with several YouTube images, but the same number come up under just "tube logo". A search for "You Tube" brings 92,120, mostly of the London Underground and experiments in laboratories. I am wondering whether the benefits of ignoring these small words are perhaps being outweighed by the drawbacks? ("We Are The World" returns 2,506,557 results, including some very nice swallowtail butterflies) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
spacecadet Posted April 12, 2014 Share Posted April 12, 2014 True but it probably helps as many as it hinders- for example German 'die' is ignored so you still get a result on the substantive word. To be fair 'youtube' is the correct name- 2043 results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vincent Lowe Posted April 12, 2014 Share Posted April 12, 2014 The answer would be to implement, at the very least, the 'exact match' option in the 'additional annotation options' that alamy have been promising for... how long now? http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andy Holmes Posted April 12, 2014 Share Posted April 12, 2014 The answer would be to implement, at the very least, the 'exact match' option in the 'additional annotation options' that alamy have been promising for... how long now? http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp This was my first thought, when reading this thread. I can understand difficulties in the introduction of the square bracket (sort of similar) alternative, but treating anything in quotes as a single search term, should give no problems whatsoever. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digi2ap Posted April 13, 2014 Share Posted April 13, 2014 The answer would be to implement, at the very least, the 'exact match' option in the 'additional annotation options' that alamy have been promising for... how long now? http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/annotation-options.asp Are some or none of these options in use? I have been going through my key wording using both the 'proximity' and 'ordering' guidance but being relatively new here assumed all options were now in operation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted April 13, 2014 Share Posted April 13, 2014 Proximity and ordering do count. It is the brackets and quotation marks that have never been implemented. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
digi2ap Posted April 13, 2014 Share Posted April 13, 2014 Thanks and good to know these options are functioning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 14, 2014 Share Posted April 14, 2014 Quotation marks are in use. "great wall of china" 8,504 - great wall of china 12,768 If a client uses the quotes then it does refine the search as intended. Alamy did hint in previous post (previous forum?) that the others would not be implemented. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NYCat Posted April 14, 2014 Share Posted April 14, 2014 But does it make a difference if WE put in quotation marks? I'm under the impression that it doesn't. Paulette Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 14, 2014 Share Posted April 14, 2014 But does it make a difference if WE put in quotation marks? I'm under the impression that it doesn't. Paulette Apologies, AFAIK they only work on the client side.... i.e they only find the ordered string. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andy Holmes Posted April 14, 2014 Share Posted April 14, 2014 I'm still getting views on partial search terms within quote marks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MariaJ Posted April 15, 2014 Share Posted April 15, 2014 I think it would be very helpful if those annotation options were operational. And it would be useful to be able to choose keyword pairs or phrases, as is done on some other sites. I think it would help clients find the right images quicker. For example, my province, "British Columbia". My images keep getting selected for searches for British this or British that, and I'm not in the UK. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted April 15, 2014 Share Posted April 15, 2014 I can't see Alamy ever making these fully functional, they didn't when they were introduced as large contribs and, more so, agencies were not going to go back and re-annotate. Add in two lowerings of commission rates and millions more images....that ship has long sailed. I haven't used the annotation options in years, not since Alamy hinted they would never be made functional - having had to rekeyword when they changed stemming (that was IIRC at 65%), I'll be dammed if I am going to do more work for them at normal agency rates. Since everyone suffers from the lack of implementation, it really doesn't matter now as long as clients are happy with the search results they currently see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Robinson Posted April 29, 2014 Author Share Posted April 29, 2014 I've just discovered that the "&" symbol IS picked up by the search engine. Fish and chips - 6,813 Fish chips - 6,813 Fish & chips - 1,116 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wiskerke Posted April 30, 2014 Share Posted April 30, 2014 Yes I knew about the ampersand (&): 2100 searches. Thinking not much would come out, I searched for some of the other !@#$%^&.Oops, that's quite a lot. And interesting ones as well. Interesting holes in the collection.Like:$1.99$9.99 (and everything in between)smartphone @snow @0% greek yogurt0.5% newspaper And what's that with the pound sign £ ?120 searches; 10.000 views, but when I try to search for it I get:Your browser is currently not supported by our new history/bookmarking schemeURIError: malformed URI sequence Maybe I should include all !@#$%^&* from now on. wim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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