Search Return Order

97

November 21, 2006

Search return order can have a major impact on the number of images from any given collection that customers are likely to see and thus on the likely revenue such images might generate.

In March I did an analysis of how the various brands on the Getty site fare in Story 810. Given the number of new collections, the number of images Getty has been adding to the site and their intentions to add significantly more, it seems like a good time to update those figures. The results provide some interesting insights.

To find the relative placement of the various brands in the search return order, I wanted to choose a search word that would be likely to give me images from every brand. Thus, I chose the word "vertical" and did a broad search for all images on the site - RM, RR and RF - with this keyword. The search returned 753,500 images. It is interesting to note that back in March there were only 553,841 images tagged with "vertical".

I then looked at which images came up in what order on the first, second and third pages of 90 images each. For comparison purposes I have shown the results of the first 90 and the first 270 for March and November. The final two columns indicate the position where the first image from each brand appears. Stone+ is currently number one and the first image from the Johner Images RF brand doesn't come up until image 239 in the search order.

As might be expected Stone+, Stone, Taxi, TIB and Photographer's Choice come up early and often, but it is interesting to note that due to the increased number of brands on the site only about half as many images are now being shown as was the case in March. In March, Photonica was in the number 3 slot, but now that position has been turned over to Riser. It is also interesting that in the first 270 we get to see more Riser images than either Stone+, Stone, TIB or Photographer's Choice. The only brand that gets to show more images than Riser is National Geographic and while their first images doesn't come up until slot 54 once we start seeing Nat Geo images we see a lot of them. If we count the Nat Geo RF images as well as RM they have a total of 23 images in the first 270.

Based on what we learned from our analysis in March, after about 250 to 300 they start recycling the same search order so most brands will have about double the number of images listed here shown in the first 540 images.

As might be expected, once Getty took over ownership of Stockbyte Platinum the brand's search return position moved up markedly. In this case the brand has more images in the first 90 and 270 returns than was the case in March.

Looking at the brands whose first image position went up compared to what it was in March may give us an indication of which are among the favored brands. Altrendo and Blend both had improvements in their position. Both of these companies have also put images in Riser so they get additional slots and the possible benefit of their images being seen earlier as they get the benefit from Riser's positioning.

More and more brands are offering images as RF as well as RM and it seems likely that they will make images available in RR also. In this way they have the potential of getting more slots and a better chance that customers will see one of their images.

It should be kept in mind that searches for other keywords that many brands might not have could produce markedly different return results. If the search was for Cancun, Mexico the results might be much different because many brands would have no images and their slot would be skipped over. Nevertheless, I believe that the search engine is set up to pick images from each brand in the order images appear when doing a broad search on a term like "vertical."