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.

Why I love visual search - Top Ten List

1. I can start searching the way I think – by design elements as well as words.

2. Sometimes I need to match photo colors to a creative piece, and it has to be pretty exact.

3. I find the right stuff a lot faster than by trying 15 or 20 text searches.

4. The xcavator traces function allows me to specify photo composition or key features.

5. It’s a lot more fun! Like a toy or a game.

6. The color wheel on the Advanced Search page is really precise – really helpful.

7. I also sell photography through agencies – I can quickly check out which one needs what I have using visual search at xcavator.net.

8. The xcavator.net site gives fast results, and I can quickly look at 40 images at a time.

9. Big databases of images aren’t overwhelming anymore.

10. I can find stuff CHEAPER that still works for a project.

Submitted by Jen Hanover, Freelance graphic artist – Web, Print, and Video