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Doing a random search to see where my image EH8M3T turns up when typing in “Please do not bend”

It does not turn up at all even though they are the first 4 words in my essential keywords.

And when i copy and paste all essential keywords in order no image at all is available for the search term.

 

So I asked MS and here is the reply

 

 

Your image does not come up in the search for “Please do not bend” because ‘Do’ and ‘Not’ are stop words and our search engine does not consider these words. If you remove those words and search for example ‘Please bend envelope’ your image will come up.

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Stop words??????? Oh no no no no. Really need to know which words !!!!!!! I would guess that we should definitely use quotation marks for phrases. "Please bend envelop" to keyword "do not" is not sensible.

 

Paulette

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Alamy, like almost every other site on the internet, uses standard boolean search parameters. It's the "not" that's causing the problem with this search. It's being interpreted as "please do" NOT "bend" ie. as find the occurrence of the words "please" and "do" but without the word "bend". The other most common logical separator is "or". You can also use "+" and "-" signs.

 

Regarding quotation marks, this is another standard boolean syntax which treats the words within brackets as a single search term. It has nothing at all to do with Alamy's proposed use of quotation marks in keywording.

 

Hope this helps

 

Ian D

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I've been adding the quotation marks etc. in the hope that Alamy will implement it someday but I'm sure up until now the search engine ignored them and put commas between the words.  Something seems to have changed though - if I search for "where the wild thing were" (including the quotation marks) it finds my images and shows the complete phrase without commas in the keywords,  If I hover the mouse over it the whole phrase is highlighted.....

 

keywords1.jpg

 

However, this seems to have created another problem.  I've got "Unlocking Salford Quays" and "the lowry" within quotation marks but the individual keywords between them, 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway', are showing as a complete phrase when they shouldn't be....

 

keywords3.jpg

 

Eh..!  What happened to my screen shots - they were showing a minute ago...!

 

To answer my own question - I had 'hotlink protection' turned on.  I had to put them on my own website as I couldn't get the link to Photobucket to work - just got the 'you are not allowed...' message (has anyone figured out why yet?  I don't have this problem on other forums).

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The quotation marks anomaly again.

 

Should we use them or not?

 

Allan

 

There is no anomaly in the use of quotation marks described by Vincent above.

 

It is, as Ian describes, a standard search parameter that indicates the words within the quotes are to be considered a single search term.

 

It has nothing to do with whether or not you use them in your keywords, but if you don't use them (along with all the othe Boolean whizgigs) when searching you are not fully utilising the power of Alamy's (or pretty well any other) search engine.

 

dd

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Alamy, like almost every other site on the internet, uses standard boolean search parameters. It's the "not" that's causing the problem with this search. It's being interpreted as "please do" NOT "bend" ie. as find the occurrence of the words "please" and "do" but without the word "bend". The other most common logical separator is "or". You can also use "+" and "-" signs.

 

Regarding quotation marks, this is another standard boolean syntax which treats the words within brackets as a single search term. It has nothing at all to do with Alamy's proposed use of quotation marks in keywording.

 

Hope this helps

 

Ian D

 

Thank you. It's a good thing some people here know what they are doing.

 

Paulette

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

 

The image is CND93W if anyone wants to try it - just hover your mouse over the keywords and you'll see what I mean.

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

 

The image is CND93W if anyone wants to try it - just hover your mouse over the keywords and you'll see what I mean.

Vincent - I noticed the same thing the other day. I didn't have time to investigate though and put it on my 'To do' list.

 

Michael

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

 

The image is CND93W if anyone wants to try it - just hover your mouse over the keywords and you'll see what I mean.

Vincent - I noticed the same thing the other day. I didn't have time to investigate though and put it on my 'To do' list.

 

Michael

 

 

Oh good - not just me then..... !

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

 

 

I noticed this a long time ago. I think you'll find that searches work as you would have expected them to work, but there is an anomaly in the way in which the keywords are displayed below the image.

 

Alan

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

The image is CND93W if anyone wants to try it - just hover your mouse over the keywords and you'll see what I mean.

 

Vincent - I noticed the same thing the other day. I didn't have time to investigate though and put it on my 'To do' list.

Michael

 

Oh good - not just me then..... !

When I noticed it I thought maybe I'd put in some extra quotes by accident. I decided to have a look next time I'm key wording in Manage Images. However your screen shots show that this isn't the case for you.

 

Michael

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But what I'm getting at is that in my second example above the keywords 'sky' 'waterfront' 'yellow' and 'waterway' are not comma delimited and are showing as a single clickable link, whereas each individual keyword should be a separate link.

 

The image is CND93W if anyone wants to try it - just hover your mouse over the keywords and you'll see what I mean.

Vincent,

 

This problem has been pointed out before and seems to arise when a lot of quotation marks are used in your keywords and the system gets confused about which ones to use. In this case, it thinks that the last quote marks round "Quays"and the first round "the (Lowry)" are a phrase.

 

It makes no difference to anyone using the Alamy search engine (which uses the keyword order in the metadata) but does have an effect when someone searches on Google (which uses the keywords displayed on the zoom page as a basis for the search). Consequently, if you search for "sky waterfront yellow waterway" on Google (without the quotes), the Alamy page with your images is returned in the top position (because of the relevance of the phrase). However, if you put the words in any other order, they're nowhere to be seen - although the top result is this thread!

 

The misinterpretation of the quotes is obviously a fault but Alamy don't seem to want to correct it.

 

Ian D

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Alamy said the following while ago when I made a query.

 

According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site.                

 

It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4.

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Alamy said the following while ago when I made a query.

 

According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site.                

 

It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4.

 

Yet alamy state in their 'Keywording Do's' -  "Only use spaces to separate keywords. There is no need to use commas as well as you will use up valuable character space."

 

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

 

Presumably though, this only effects how they are displayed and each individual keyword is still searchable?

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Alamy said the following while ago when I made a query.

 

According to the current logic , 4 or less keywords not separated by any specific separator (comma, quotes ) will be considered as a phrase and they’ll not be separated by commas in the live site.                

 

It’ll be separated only if you use any allowed separator (comma, quotes) or if the number of words together is greater than 4.

 

Yet alamy state in their 'Keywording Do's' -  "Only use spaces to separate keywords. There is no need to use commas as well as you will use up valuable character space."

 

http://www.alamy.com/contributor/help/captions-keywords-descriptions.asp

 

Presumably though, this only effects how they are displayed and each individual keyword is still searchable?

 

 

AFAIK, Yes.

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