Alamy Testing Improved Search Engine
Files Patent Paperwork for New Search Technology
Oxfordshire, UK, July 12, 2006
Alamy, an international distributor of quality stock photography, announced today that it is testing new search technology called AlamyRank that will move images from the best collections to the top of search results. Alamy also said it has applied for patents for two key technologies that make the new search approach unique in the stock photography industry.
The company is currently testing AlamyRank on a sample of its customers and is working on tools to help contributors improve their position within the new hierarchy.
Alamy CEO James West said the new search engine will favour photographers and stock distributors who provide the best images and who do the best jobs of key wording and describing their work. It will, however, penalize those providing mediocre work or using inappropriate keywords, hoping their images will be seen more often.
"We think this is a huge breakthrough in terms of developing a market driven search engine that rewards talent and delivers high-quality images to the customer," asserted West. He said this is the first of several search engine improvements planned for the near future.
According to the Alamy executive, AlamyRank (patents pending) automatically creates a hierarchy of individual image suppliers based on the search activity of customers. To determine the rankings, Alamy records the number of times customers view larger previews and license images relative to the number of times the images have appeared in search results.
The second software package, called the Diversity Algorithm (patents pending), will ensure that no individual supplier dominates any particular search. The Diversity Algorithm will disperse the images of even the highest-ranked suppliers so that image buyers see work from many different sources before seeing more images from the top-ranked suppliers.
West said photographers eventually will be able to tweak their image collections to get the most out of the new system.
"While we are trialling this technology on our customers we are also developing a suite of tools to let contributors see their AlamyRank scores. Contributors will be able to refine their submissions to improve their scores," West said.
"We are moving further away from a traditional agency system to one where photographers can manage their own collections based on feedback directly from the market," West said. "We expect search results will improve as our suppliers respond to information from the marketplace."
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