Alamy, the largest stock photography collection on the web, is launching a new generation of products and tools to improve the search experience for customers.
A new search engine and a new keywording structure are among the initiatives planned by the company which is set to reach 10 million images by the end of the year.
The aim is to improve the speed and quality of the search experience for customers and to help contributors compete by giving them a better way of keywording their images.
Alamy CEO James West said: “The number of images available online is increasing dramatically. As a consequence of this, picture buyers will spend longer looking for the images they need and image producers will spend more time describing their pictures in order to stand out from the crowd. Alamy is leading this trend.”
The changes follow the introduction last year of AlamyRank, a system based on customer activity that brings the best and most appropriately keyworded images to the top of the search.
The new search engine, due to be released in Quarter 3 2007, has been built to be compatible with the new developments which also include future versions of AlamyRank, customer search activity reporting tools, greater speed and stronger relevancy.
New keywording will start later this year. Images already in the system are unaffected, meaning that contributors will not be forced to re-keyword existing collections. But they can choose to do so to reap the benefits of the new approach.
The new structure allows contributors to be comprehensive in their keywording without penalising their AlamyRank. This works like a pyramid, with the importance of the various keyword fields diminishing as the fields increase in size.
Another new tool is AlamyMeasures which will allow contributors to see how often their images have been viewed and clicked by customers and how they are performing against the rest of the collection.
“These projects mark the start of an exciting time for our company,” said West. “Giving finer control to our contributors over how their images are seen by the search engine will, in time, improve the quality and accuracy of the customer experience.
“Of equal importance to looking forward however, is not leaving those who already have images on Alamy behind. The changes you will see over the coming months are designed to open up new opportunities for all our contributors, new and existing, as our business develops.”
More details are on: www.alamy.com/Blog/contributor/archive/2007/06/19/1702.aspx.
This article was last modified on April 3, 2022
This article was first published on June 21, 2007
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