Search Terms

[ROC]

Can anyone explain to me why a search brings up your images that don’t have the search term used in your keywords? For example, a search ‘red squirrel’ brings up photos of grey squirrels where the word ‘red’ has never been used in the keywords. It then affects the CTR.  I’m sure we all do our best to keep the keywords relevant to the image so I wish this didn’t happen. 

[spacecadet]

This has been brought up in the past and IIRC the answer was that words under 4 letters may be ignored in search. Obviously this excludes "and" and "the" and so on but sometimes it has unintended consequences.

You could mention it to MS but it may be unfixable.

[ROC]

2 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

This has been brought up in the past and IIRC the answer was that words under 4 letters may be ignored in search. Obviously this excludes "and" and "the" and so on but sometimes it has unintended consequences.

You could mention it to MS but it may be unfixable.

Thanks for the reply. It doesn’t make sense though, so anyone looking for a red squirrel will get every single squirrel image come up. How frustrating for a potential buyer! 

[spacecadet]

4 minutes ago, ROC said:

Thanks for the reply. It doesn’t make sense though, so anyone looking for a red squirrel will get every single squirrel image come up. How frustrating for a potential buyer! 

You did put "red squirrel" in quotes and not just apostrophes, didn't you? I didn't get any greys in my search.

Anyway you could try a Boolean- NOT grey. That does something odd to the numbers.

Edited September 21, 2020 by spacecadet

[Joseph Clemson]

How far do you have to go down a search for red squirrel before you start seeing grey squirrel pictures returned? I skimmed through at the first 30 pages of the search and saw only red squirels. There were 45000+ matches, so there may be grey squirrels further down the search, but certainly not in the first pages.

 

On subjects where the search finds only a small number of matches to the search term, it will look for something close. So if there were only a few hundred red squirrel pictures in the collection, it might then start to return pictures of grey squirrels as that matches at least one of the search words. As far as I can see though, from my quick experiment, the search looks to be working as one would expect.

 

ETA I didn't use quotes in my search, just the two word term

Edited September 21, 2020 by Joseph Clemson

[Chris Burrows]

You have the search term "displace red squirrels" in the keywords for some of the pictures.  My knowledge of keywords and how phrases are searched is limited, I gave up trying to understand alamy's keyword changes years ago, but I think this is what is causing them to come up in searches for red squirrels.

Edited September 21, 2020 by Chris Burrows

[spacecadet]

24 minutes ago, Chris Burrows said:

"displace red squirrels"

I don't quite get your point, but if you're suggesting that having "displace" is causing results to be somehow "displaced", I'm sure you're wrong about that. The only way you can influence search  with words that are not searched on is with Booleans, as I suggested.

[Chris Burrows]

1 hour ago, spacecadet said:

I don't quite get your point, but if you're suggesting that having "displace" is causing results to be somehow "displaced", I'm sure you're wrong about that. The only way you can influence search  with words that are not searched on is with Booleans, as I suggested.

Displace was not the word was not referring to and to be honest I have no idea what a Booleans is.  The OP queried why " a search ‘red squirrel’ brings up photos of grey squirrels where the word ‘red’ has never been used in the keywords." I was pointing out that the phrase "displace red squirrels" which appears in several of the OP's pictures of grey squirrels includes the word red.

EDIT   From Alamy advice on tagging

"Our tagging system does not exclude constituent words of a tag from being searched for e.g. “Banff National Park” will still show up for “banff”,”national park” and “park” searches

Edited September 21, 2020 by Chris Burrows
Added Edit

[meanderingemu]

i just did a couple of tests,

 

 

took a search with only 4 results, added "red' no quotes, and got 0 match.   

 

 

so now i did "displace red squirrels" as suggested, not quotes, all 12 images are of Grey squirrels, but they all have "displace red squirrels" in the keywords, so search works.  How many results are you getting? 

 

do you have an example of one that doesn't have "red" in KW?

Edited September 21, 2020 by meanderingemu

[meanderingemu]

Test part 2.  

 

Now did "red squirrels grey"  and the images of Grey squirrel in search I looked at had some form of word Red in KW or description.  Some were fair, mainly Squirrel eating from Red Matus,  but most are extremely KW spammed, which to me is the big problem for customers, and should be addressed,

 

 

so curious to see examples from OP 

[spacecadet]

1 hour ago, Chris Burrows said:

Displace was not the word was not referring to and to be honest I have no idea what a Booleans is.  The OP queried why " a search ‘red squirrel’ brings up photos of grey squirrels where the word ‘red’ has never been used in the keywords." I was pointing out that the phrase "displace red squirrels" which appears in several of the OP's pictures of grey squirrels includes the word red.

EDIT   From Alamy advice on tagging

"Our tagging system does not exclude constituent words of a tag from being searched for e.g. “Banff National Park” will still show up for “banff”,”national park” and “park” searches

Understood. The OP did say he hadn't used "red" and I took him at his word.

Can I suggest you look up Boolean logic. You can include and exclude by use of AND and NOT (in capitals), for example. I have found it helpful in checking my own tags here. For example, if I don't see as many results as I think there should be in a search in Measures, I can check if I've missed a tag out of any of my images.

 

Edited September 21, 2020 by spacecadet

[ROC]

Thank you for your comments. Somebody used the search term ‘red squirrels’ - I don’t know if they used quotes or not. It showed up in my ‘Alamy Measures’ and the images that appeared in the search were of grey squirrels. But thank you Chris, I had forgotten that with some of my older grey squirrel images I used the phrase ‘displace red squirrels’.  My keywording has improved since then! On a positive note, I have had some good sales of grey squirrel images. My last one was for $***.   Another appeared in the New Scientist.  
I now need to look at old images and the keywords I used, and do a bit of deleting.