iStock Search Updates

A new software release went out yesterday on iStockphoto.com.  Unfortunately, while some favorite functionality has returned, some new buggy-ness has surfaced.

Good news for everyone who has been clamoring for the “Color Search” and “Copyspace Finder” tools that disappeared late last year.  They have now returned, to be found amidst all the search options in the left column.  They both seem to be working – the color search giving back a very targeted set of results based on your choice, and the copyspace finder helping to find areas of “blank-ish” information within images.  The choices appear in the “bread box” at the top, and are easily removed.

There have been some changes to keyworded search return results, and this is where the problems are arising.  In the recent past, they’ve been trying to be smart with the search, so if you were to enter “New York City winter”, the search would break it up into strange combinations, trying to isolate the useful phrase, “New York City” unsuccessfully, giving a list in the bread box like:

  • New York
  • City
  • Winter
  • New
  • York

So, it was essentially a mess.   Now, it seems to want to just find the important phrase and split it out, but in the case above, there is actually a phrase in the controlled vocabulary added by a user that is “New York City winter”.  So the search finds that, assumes it is an exact match and returns just one file.  So the searcher needs to do:

“New York City” and winter

… which of course is not intuitive at all.  So for the unforseeable future, use the word “AND” between searches.  Even something as silly as “sexy businesswoman” returns zero results, while “sexy AND businesswoman” gives the right return.

And that’s the news for today.

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