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A Quick Example How to Use the Powerful Xcavator.net Tool

On Xcavator.net, you can search by keyword, category or provider.

A typical search:

1. The typical search process begins with a new keyword search.
   
2. Use a keyword or two to start your search, and you will get many results.
3. Click on items you like and select the match button to begin visual image search. Or, drag and drop an image you like into the image search box in the upper left of the page. Either of these gives more specific options now in your search results.
4. Choose a new image you like and bring this again to the search box in the upper left. Or, drag the image into the upper left image search box.
5. Select the image you like.
   

The internal workings of the xcavator search technology

If you’ve already played or worked with xcavator.net, you may have become curious about how it works. Here is a brief description of its inner mechanics.

Xcavator.net provides several tools for finding the right image. You may:

1) Narrow search results with images by using keywords;

2) Select images with a certain dominant color;

3) Find images that look similar to a selected reference image, and finally;

4) Interactively choose certain parts in the reference image to make them and their spatial relationship more prominent when searching for similar images - the 'traces' function.

In our solution, all these tools are implemented with just two distinct search engines: one for keywords, dominant color and image similarity and the other for the 'traces' interactive visual search. The former one is based on so-called indexing techniques, so I call it index search, which combines visual and text information into a single data structure and produces results very quickly, regardless of the size of an image collection. The results of our indexed search are superb for this class of algorithms, and we can handle significantly larger image collections than our competitors.

The purpose of the second interactive search engine is to further tune the search results to specific user needs. Interactive search is much more accurate and specific than the index search because the user can select important image parts and skip unimportant ones. We call this 'traces' on the site because the user can pick points of interest or trace through a feature or feature using the mouse. The interactive search is applied to the results of the index search as a refinement tool, and it brings the best images to the top of the search results based on this additional user-defined search criteria.

There is a lot of interesting things to be said about the interactive search. I’ll cover this topic in one of my next posts. Meanwhile, I highly recommend watching our Video Intro to learn how to use our search engines in the most efficient manner.

Transition in Stock Photography Search

In the last ten years I’ve worked with a large number of stock photography websites. For my clients, I would not particularly enjoy the task of finding the perfect image for their company website home page. I would typically visit Corbis.com or Gettyimages.com in Firefox and execute possible searches. Each search would be opened in a new browser tab for later drill down. One out of twenty searches would find that amazing image I needed. Utilizing advanced search rarely worked faster, usually pulling up zero results based on my request. Sometimes the search for the right image may take an hour or two if for a huge website with specific needs.

It has been a pleasure working with Xcavator.net. If this tool had been around many years ago, I would have certainly saved a lot of time. I also would have found more of the right kind of images I was looking for to choose from.

It does take a couple of minutes to get used to the power behind the Xcavator.net search tool. Once a person acclimates to the strength of this tool, it is truly a pleasure to search for stock photography. I find it amazing how much time the right tool can save.

Keyword search often gets you everything you don’t want

OK, here is the scenario. You are working in an ad agency and your job is fairly simple. You search the Internet for photographs / images required by the design team at your ad agency, narrow the choices down to three and forward them to your immediate boss. A meeting is about to start with the client who wants a redo of their campaign and you have twenty minutes. The description of the required photo is “an oldish woman in white dress smiling and playing tennis with a green or blue backdrop”. Well, did you say your job was simple?

You rush to your PC, open all the famous stock photo sites and type “old woman playing tennis white dress” in their search boxes and all you get is “0 results found” or “No files found”. But you recall coming across photos like this on these same sites. Time: 15 minutes remaining. OK, you say, let me try “woman playing tennis in a white dress”. 0 results / files found. Time remaining: 12 minutes. Now you are getting furious. You have no choice but to put the simplest of search terms “woman playing tennis” and of course you are flooded with hundreds of search results with young, old, women, couples, in all possible colors of dress, playing or just standing with a tennis racket and also a few with a table tennis paddle. Blue or green backdrop? May God help you. You know you are not going to make it in the remaining 8 minutes.

Is your job simple? No! You have one of the toughest jobs around. This is the predicament of people like you in ad agencies, and the larger creative community – just about anyone searching for a copyrighted image on the net. And this is where http://www.xcavator.net comes to your rescue. Check it out to make your tasks simpler, and of course, you can get the exact search results you need in much less than 20 minutes.

What Stock Buyers are Looking For - The Big Picture

A picture is worth a thousand words. It really is as simple as that. Photos can convey a world of emotions and several messages, often more powerfully and instantly than, say, a well-written 3 paragraph article.

Great sellers of stock know this. They take a lot of good pictures just like everyone else, of course – but they submit to stock agencies the powerful, compelling images that will most likely convey an idea or thought, because they know these photos will sell. Think of how hard the creative community works to come up with words or catch phrases to convey a message in a powerful way. They want something that will get the client and the market buzzing, with those words on everyone’s lips.

So if you’re a seller of stock – give them the visual equivalent of that fantastic catch phrase – and it will sell! It really is as simple as that.

Submitted by Joanne Evers, Director of Online Marketing, Domain Home