Photographers love to hate Best Match, snickering at its name, BMâ and discussing it at length in the shadows of forums everywhere. We know. The mystery of how BM functions is being analyzed regularly by everyone.
With BM, we have one, clear goal: to put the best content in front of our clients. We have finite slots on the first page and tens-of-thousands of files vying for those spots. We understand we won't make every artist happy, but we do our best to be fair when slotting files into BM search results.
A long time ago we developed an algorithm to rank keywords on each file. Since then, we've been tracking data for every single file on iStock. Guess what? It works. Starting in mid-January we will start applying these results to BM searches. For clients it will mean more accurate, more meaningful and more relevant results. For artists it means a massive shift. The results for everyone, are going to be very, very different.
This development is part of a multi-year strategy that we all undertook, starting with the CV (Controlled Vocabulary) that we took (and improved) from Getty Images, nearly three years ago. For those who are unfamiliar with the history, this is the technology that allows us to translate keywords in multiple languages automatically. Next, we all went through a year of disambiguation. You remember if you were here in 2007, the painful steps of going through each file and clarifying and exacting the keywords for every file in your portfolio. Most recently we began our ZTS (Zero Tolerance Spam) program, which is an ongoing initiative to ensure that there are no irrelevant terms or keywords in every file. It hasn't been easy and we understand the great amount of work everyone has endured to make our search results the best they can be. The quality of results has vastly improved since 2006 when we began this endeavor.
With the launch of our new keyword ranking system the culmination of years of work by thousands of people will come to fruition, providing iStock clients with what we think will be the most impressive and most exact search results, for community created media, found anywhere on the planet. In January when the new Best Match launches, it will finally live up to its name and accurately give clients the Best Match for their search terms. We will begin pulling leavers and turning dials to slowly turn up ranking in BM starting next week!