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Small words not searchable - problems


Phil Robinson

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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)

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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 yogurt
0.5% 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

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