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Has Alamy changed its search algorithm (again!)?


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2 hours ago, John Walker said:

 

Similar for me   - usually 40 - 50 per month but only 8 so far this month.

 

I guess there a a few possibilities here:

  1. The search engine has changed in which case there would be winners as well as losers. I guess number of views might be more indicative of this than the number of zooms.
  2. They have altered the way they report/measure views/zooms
  3. Alamy is simply getting less traffic than previously
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12 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

My zooms are almost non-existent also. One for the rolling week. One puny distributor sale.

 

One solitary zoom and no sales..... very very unusual.... something would appear to be amiss.....

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18 zooms since January 1st. It is picking up but slower than normal, maybe businesses have had a long Christmas New Year break.

4 sales and one stupid pointless annoying personal use refund. Personal use sales should be declared non refundable at the point of purchase along with print use.

 

Craig

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1 hour ago, Martyn said:

 

One solitary zoom and no sales..... very very unusual.... something would appear to be amiss.....

I’m wondering if Alamy is short-staffed during this period after the holidays. In the past when this has happened. I usually get a clump of zooms at once. Catch up, so to speak. Here’s hoping. 

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2 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I’m wondering if Alamy is short-staffed during this period after the holidays. In the past when this has happened. I usually get a clump of zooms at once. Catch up, so to speak. Here’s hoping. 

 

I like the positive thinking!

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34 minutes ago, Betty LaRue said:

I’m wondering if Alamy is short-staffed during this period after the holidays. In the past when this has happened. I usually get a clump of zooms at once. Catch up, so to speak. Here’s hoping. 

I've just been through and re-chased a few sales from September for which I was initially told would be billed last week. As you say, hopefully there'll be an avalanche soon

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1 hour ago, Betty LaRue said:

I’m wondering if Alamy is short-staffed during this period after the holidays. In the past when this has happened. I usually get a clump of zooms at once. Catch up, so to speak. Here’s hoping. 

I didn’t think the zoom count required human intervention.

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Alamy's reply to my e-mail

 

"Thanks for the email. Our search engine team are aware of the specifics of your email and of other similar emails regarding questions over search ordering.

 

While all our metrics suggest the new search engine is working better for our customers than ever before, we are constantly looking at ways of tweaking and improving the results. A number of different algorithms can be in place at any one time and different groups of users including different customer groups may well see different ordering of search results as a consequence. We monitor the data from this very closely and it helps us implement constant improvements over time.


As we have previously mentioned on the forum and email responses to contributors, we recommend that you do not change the way you apply Supertags and Tags to your images and continue to keyword and caption your images accurately. We understand that this advice has been criticised but our aim is to ensure that photographers who take good relevant pictures, who use the correct metadata, and whose images sell well see their pictures get to the top of the results.

 

Any tweaks or changes we make to the search engine now or in the future will aim to benefit those photographers who follow our recommendations."

 

It's nice to hear this, but  as a photographer who does follow Alamys' recommendations I can see no advantage or explanation for why in a search for "Bury St Edmunds",  images of three old men in santa suits, a girl on a merry go round and a used car on the forecourt of a dealership (all mine)  should turn up on pages 1 and 2, whereas other more appropriately keyworded images are very much lower down. 

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

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2 minutes ago, Doc said:

 

 

It's nice to hear this, but  as a photographer who does follow Alamys' recommendations I can see no advantage or explanation for why in a search for "Bury St Edmunds",  images of three old men in santa suits, a girl on a merry go round and a used car on the forecourt of a dealership (all mine)  should turn up on pages 1 and 2, whereas other more appropriately keyworded images are very much lower down. 

 

Kumar (the Doc one)

 

Don't knock it.:)

 

Allan

 

 

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I noticed on the Alamy Blog, I think, that there are now over 70,000 "active" contributors on Alamy.  That is a significant increase from the 55,000 figure I saw last year.  They still tout over 100,000 images per day, submitted, but that could conceivably be 300,000 for all we know.

 

Knowing Alamy has built in ways to make sure there is a diverse selection to choose from by placing some (for diversity sake) images further up toward page one or so, is it possibly that we are just seeing the results of this massive increase of photographers contributing??  I was thinking it could be that or perhaps the addition of several very large library's, collections or what ever.

 

Edit:  I have to add that I have totally given up trying to figure out how the Alamy search function works.  Just too many variables and, state secrets, to make sense of it.

 

Rick

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Hi All

 

 

Something strange happened for me today even though I had my first sale and zoom last week, this morning in measures 4 of my Images showed up for this search term

 

"Ölheizung"  even though that search term is not in any keywords caption etc etc never had this happen before .

 

Is this the new algorithm or an auto translate.

 

Like the rest of you views etc on the deck .

 

Regards

 

 

Jon

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2 minutes ago, Jon Lewis said:

Hi All

 

 

Something strange happened for me today even though I had my first sale and zoom last week, this morning in measures 4 of my Images showed up for this search term

 

"Ölheizung"  even though that search term is not in any keywords caption etc etc never had this happen before .

 

Is this the new algorithm or an auto translate.

 

Like the rest of you views etc on the deck .

 

Regards

 

 

Jon

Auto translate. German for oil-fired heating.

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On 09/01/2018 at 14:44, ReeRay said:

 

From 30-40 zooms per month I'm currently down to just one zoom in January. 

 

Note to self that next times zooms drop then tell the forum. They came thundering in today ! All now back on track. 

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2 minutes ago, ReeRay said:

 

Note to self that next times zooms drop then tell the forum. They came thundering in today ! All now back on track. 

 

Hopefully getting back on track as 4 zooms in measures for yesterday.

 

John.

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Views dropped, but CTR above average for me. Zooms bit below average. Most disturbing: no sales (yet) for January. 

Somehow I get most of sales reported on thursdays and fridays, so fingers crossed for today and tomorrow.

 

Perry

 

3 sales dropped in today, looks we are back to normal :)

 

 

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