The xcavator Blog

xcavations and other musings from our team

Monday, April 07, 2008

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.

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