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AlamyMeasures (beta) - follow up note 1

Permalink Comments (26)6 December 2007 at 09:14 by James West - CEO
Posted under News, Rambling CEO

Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions on the blog and forum pages. This has been very helpful in enabling us to understand what you would like to see done differently. The good news is that there seems to be quite a lot of consensus about what the key issues are.

Your feedback is being reviewed for the next round of changes to AlamyMeasures on which work will start shortly. I will update this blog with more details later.

One of the most common questions is 'why don't all my sales show up?'. This is because the tool only shows sales for search terms where the system is certain that the search term(s) and the sale are linked. It is quite common, for example, for customers to perform a number of searches before making a purchase. This can make it hard to establish a strong correllation between the search and the purchase. We are thinking of ways increase the number of sales that are reported by AlamyMeasures, but for the time being your sales stats are limited to ones for which we are confident of a link.

Many of you have commented on the way in which the search engine is interpreting particular keywords and phrases. We are tackling this in a number of ways - first, the new keywording structure allows you to demote words that are generating strange results for the customer - second, we will shortly be announcing a way for you to report suggested changes to how certain words and phrases are stemmed - third, our search engine team are about to begin work on taking more account of the proximity of words in the keyword fields (this will reduce the impact of, for e.g., combinations of photographer name and a keyword that create an erroneuous match with a phrase that a customer may have searched for).

On a more general note, we're enjoying this beta approach to development! This has got us motivated to look at ways to beta trial other tools for contributors so that we can learn quickly and make improvements to our systems faster in future.

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Add your own commentComments (26)

  1. 06 December 2007 at 10:03 Shaun Finch

    Thanks - good to see you are taking note of comments and the forum.
    AlamyMeasures is a useful tool and with development can be even more helpful.
    I am also pleased to see you are reviewing the way a photographers name shows up in searches. With my surname "Finch" my photos keep coming up in searches that they should not!

  2. 06 December 2007 at 10:14 IanMurray

    It seems that the same sale can show up twice, presumably when two searches produced the same image and it was clicked on both times.

    I have two other people's names in my pseudo list - Ilene Macdonald and M.Stock. It shows their seacrh terms and their images.

    Any additional guidance on how to interpret/analise the data would be useful.

    Does Measures show searches done by Alamy staff in response to image requests?

    Overall, a very useful addition to our tools.

    One thing I noticed is how the supposed quiet summer months of July and August had just as much activity as any other month.

    I hope that the warm welcome given to this and the useful feedback will encourage more early beta trials.

    Thanks Alamy

  3. 06 December 2007 at 10:15 IanMurray

    It seems that the same sale can show up twice, presumably when two searches produced the same image and it was zoomed both times?

    I have two other people's names in my pseudo list - Ilene Macdonald and M.Stock. It shows their seacrh terms and their images.

    Any additional guidance on how to interpret/analise the data would be useful.

    Does Measures show searches done by Alamy staff in response to image requests?

    Overall, a very useful addition to our tools.

    One thing I noticed is how the supposed quiet summer months of July and August had just as much activity as any other month.

    I hope that the warm welcome given to this and the useful feedback will encourage more early beta trials.

    Thanks Alamy

  4. 06 December 2007 at 10:21 Ian Murray

    Apologies for duplicate post above

    How does CTR relate to AlamyRank?

  5. 06 December 2007 at 13:00 Ian m butterfield

    Having been out of the country for a couple of weeks I'm only just getting to grips with Almay Measures so appologies if this has been covered elsewhere.

    Firstly I'd like to thank Alamy for going down a public beta testing route for new features. If nothing else it enables us to see what others are thinking - also I think the level of feedback Alamy will get will be much more accurate than that provided by the use of selected individuals (as has been used in the past).

    May be it is just the way I think, but as useful as the information is, it just feels backwards to. Rather than looking at a search string and seeing what images it found, what I would find really helpful is starting with an image to see what search strings were used to find it, how many times it was viewed, how many times it was zoomed. That information would enable me to identify and prosibly remove the images that are frequently being viewed but are not getting any zooms. It would also identify the images which need more attention because they are not getting any views.

    As a follow on to that would it it be possible for the excel export to include the image ids in a column that are associated with each search term. Without that info I'm not sure what use the the spreadsheet export is.

    Regards
    Ian M Butterfield
    www.imb.biz
    www.iphotos.co.uk

  6. 06 December 2007 at 17:13 Peter Barritt

    well done Alamy for reading and acting on comments so promptly. Measures is a great tool IMHO. It shows those of our pictures that are generating interest and those that need keyword changes. Ideally it would be helpful to be able to rank all our photos in terms of sales, zooms and views. This could make deletions a bit more scientific. It is also a great insight into picture buyers brains. I liked one who searched for "couple huging". I imagine this could lead to conversations like... "Not tonight darling, I just want you to huge me."
    Agree too that if changes to RF and RP rules has been trialled this way , there might have been a bit less chaos.
    Peter Barritt

  7. 06 December 2007 at 21:30 Kathy de witt

    If I click at the top of a column to rearrange the information, say to get all of my sales at the top, I would like the other columns to stay fixed. That way it would make it possible to compare several at once.

    Overall, very impressed with measures, but I would like to see how many times an individual image has been clicked on or sold.

    Kathy

  8. 06 December 2007 at 23:29 Clive Rowley

    Thanks Alamy for the follow up. I see this as an on-going development which can only help all of us.

    I am still developing my approach to the information held in AlamyMeasures, and also in conjunction with the allocation of time I still need to re-keyword so many of my images.

  9. 07 December 2007 at 11:26 Patrick Nairne

    Thanks for introducing this really useful tool. However, please please make the description field non searchable. Descriptions are useful for many editorial pictures, but because the field is searchable a lot of very strange and inappropriate results are being returned. I would be interested to know what others think about this.

  10. 07 December 2007 at 12:17 JC Tonkin

    I agree with Patrick comment 9, I have a number of images coming up on searches purely because of details in the description field, and obviously they are not getting clicks because they are not appropriate.

  11. 07 December 2007 at 13:23 Gary were

    When I go to the AM page in My Alamy, I see a single summary line which shows my total views, zooms and average CTR. Fine. But if I expand the view (by clicking on my pseudonym) to see the detail, my CTR value changes. The revised figure is incorrect according to my calcs.

    Anyone else getting this?

  12. 07 December 2007 at 16:59 Julie Woodhouse

    Many thanks for this very useful facility. I agree with comments made above about making the description field non-searchable. I have a number of searches coming up from this field, all are totally irrelevant to the search. The description field is useful for additional information for buyers, but not as a search tool. I don't want to have to delete description information because of irrelevant searches but if the field continues to be searchable it may be the only option.

  13. 07 December 2007 at 17:57 David McIntyre

    I agree that the description field should not be searchable (actually, I assumed it wasn't). We need a place for additional information that the search engine won't find, and the description field seems like the logical place.

  14. 07 December 2007 at 19:19 Brian R. Tolbert

    ..."would it it be possible for the excel export to include the image ids in a column that are associated with each search term. Without that info I'm not sure what use the the spreadsheet export is."
    Please see about adding both the Alamy IMAGE ID and more importantly the photographers reference #/ID to make this a very helpful tool.

    Thanks

  15. 07 December 2007 at 23:53 Clive rowley

    "One of the most common questions is 'why don't all my sales show up?'. This is because the tool only shows sales for search terms where the system is certain that the search term(s) and the sale are linked."

    I'm wondering "Why don't all my views show up?"

    I deliberately found a sale made on 08 June 2007 and chased back the total views & zooms and found that the image which had sold was viewed, not zoomed, two weeks earlier on 25 May 2007. It was the only image on the whole of alamy that fitted the two words put into the search engine.It was tried in singular and plural, each producing just my image.

    So, it seems it must be possible to buy an image without even zooming on it?

  16. 07 December 2007 at 23:56 Clive rowley

    My apology - I should have written "Why don't all my zooms show up?"

    (Meanwhile I was 'debited' with 2 views {winky face}

  17. 08 December 2007 at 01:20 Jeff Greenberg

    I hope there are no "qualified buyers" that are also contributors. That opens the door to CTR Sabotage...?

  18. 08 December 2007 at 10:11 Rainer Raffalski

    Looking through my Alamy Maesures (a very good tool, btw) I find that the search engine searches even the file names. That is really a mess because it delivers lots of unwanted search results.

    For example: any search for 3 people finds all my people images with the figure 3 at the end of the file name, regardless of the number of people appearing in the image. That means lots of false search results, unwanted by the buyer as well as by me.

    So Alamy should definitely change that: The file name should not be searchable!

    Rainer Raffalski

  19. 08 December 2007 at 17:36 Phil scalia

    I'd like to see a list of keywords that yielded nothing. Conceivably would help contributors fill holes in the archive.

  20. 09 December 2007 at 13:26 Mark scheuern

    A nice feature would be to be able to search by image rather than search string. That is, a contributor could select one of their images and see the stats for that image (search strings that brought viewers there, number of views, number of zooms, etc.)

    Also, when will the new search engine be running? Currently, not all annotation features are used. In particular, quoted phrases are still searchable by the individual words, turning off stemming doesn't work and, as others have said, the description field is still searchable.

    Mark

  21. 09 December 2007 at 14:38 Gary Were

    I agree with Rainer Raffalski. Someone has searched using just '£1.34'. They got my (beautiful :-) ) image of a field of poppies because it has 34 in the file name. Surely not what they were looking for.

  22. 09 December 2007 at 16:17 Kathy de witt

    I do wish that Alamy Measures would continue over the weekend and not come to an abrupt halt with no statistics for Friday, on Saturday.

    Maybe this will happen once the complete version is unleashed.

  23. 09 December 2007 at 17:04 Jaybee

    Finding AM very useful for noting words that need to be stemmed (roll on Search 2.0).

    Agree that the description field should not be indexed and would love to see measures for Friday show up on a Saturday rather than wait for Monday morning.

    Looking forward to further revisions.

  24. 11 December 2007 at 22:49 william robinson

    To make the description unsearchable, would placing quotation-marks around the whole text exclude it

  25. 12 December 2007 at 11:27 Robert estall

    I understand the search engine is evolving but I was surprised to see that a simple plant portrait was presented in a search for Boxford because I had entered Boxford Suffolk in the location field when completing the annotation form.

    Changing the location to read garden removed it from the search. next day of course

  26. 12 December 2007 at 18:01 Dennis

    How about making available all searches as a weekly CSV file download with fields "search string","views","zooms","CRT" ?

    Thanks :-)

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