Alamy search - Oldies are Goldies, rare is beautiful ?

[Andreas]

I just checked how pictures from my last travel to Chile are listed, search term example 'Chile Carretera Austral' (major road in Patagonia), All types, sort by relevant. I travelled to Chile earlier in 2017, in 2023 I concentrated on drone shots. 

On the first 4 pages I found 18 of my Chile files, only 6 new ones created 2023.

My first drone shots of 2023 show up on page 13, 18, 19  - one each. Most drone shots uploaded March-May, > 200. I was quite lucky with the weather the first weeks, made a couple of good shots.

Looks like Alamy search follows the 'Oldies are Goldies' logic. And, if a subject is rare within a photographers collection, prefer it. Which is somehow meaningless - if the weather is good a photographer shoots as much as possible, different angles, different times of day. If the weather is bad, its not a day to shoot much for stock. 

Question: do you  notice similar behavior ? Oldies are Goldies, rare is beautiful ?

Edited July 11 by Andreas

[GeorgeCScott]

I've noticed the Oldies are Goldies issue. When I search for the area near my home, using the search box on the Alamy website, the first page of results mostly dates from 2005 to 2019.  If you sort by Newest to Oldest you can see that there are a lot more recent photos available.

[Andreas]

Changing the sort order to newest changes the result, sure -but if a customer uses just the default search option the offered selection shows mainly old pictures. And prefers the rare ones, which does not make much sense. Rainy day, dull, take a photo - Alamy shows it first.
Alamy ran some tests with AI ... not sure what the status is. In my example above, the first 4 pages showed 45 pictures of the marble caves, a rock formation in a lake. A lot of them overexposed, dull color, not really appealing.

I wonder if the decreasing sales reported e.g. in the 'how was your .... ' section are caused by limitations of the search.

[Harry Harrison]

Interesting observations about the new algorithm for 'Relevant' and the fact that it has now been made the default. The sort order changes have been discussed in a couple of earlier threads but with no resolution and it seems to be work in progress.

 

 

"Apologies for this inconvenience and thank you for your patience. Our IT Team have today informed us that this was caused by a knock on effect with other work they're doing internally with some sort order changes and they aim to sort this issue within the next couple of months. The extended time frame of this issue being resolved is down to the fact that there is other work going on internally and they need to make sure that this work does not impact other areas of the website, and that everything performs as expected. "
 

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/17700-display-order/#comment-361965

 

 

From the title this thread seems to be talking about the Contributors Portfolio, and Alamy took it this way, but in fact it isn't. They are related because the default in the Portfolio has also changed to the new 'Relevant' sort order but there is no way to change it to anything else in the Contributors Portfolio.

 

https://discussion.alamy.com/topic/17600-image-order-in-portfolio-randomly-re-organised/

 

 

[Andreas]

Additional note: I ran a test 'Norway Hardangerfjord' where I have a large portfolio of waterfalls, apple farms, boats, snowy mountains, drone shots ....

Eleven pictures of my portfolio on the first two pages is ok - but, ten of the pics have only one subject, the Hardanger bridge.

 

Diversity is overrated ........