Just as the word “captions” has slipped out of style in our stock photo industry, the word “keywords” will soon be outdated. What will take its place? keyphrases.

Here’s a short Library Science/internet Engineering chronicle.

Back in the mid 90’s, most people entered a website from what they called the “Home Page”. From there, using the site’s search engine, they navigated about the site using a keyword. This often brought them to a page within the site that was specifically useful to them.

Finding images improved when each web-site provided its own search feature to visitors. These in-house search engines proved useful until the availability of on-line images mushroomed.

Along came Alta Vista and a couple other search engines in 1995 that said, “No, you don’t have to go to a Home Page to start your search. Start with us.”

That meant, using a keyword, you could enter a website from anywhere, -- a front door, a cellar door, the chimney, or a window.
Back then, how many websites were available? About a million –and that was amazing to all of us. Finding your target subject was not difficult, but it was sluggish.

THE ONSLAUGHT

Today, there are over a trillion websites. And several thousand images are entered into the Internet daily. If there are a trillion websites, there are surely a quadrillion images on-line. How to find a particular one? If super-sophisticated search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSM, etc., hadn’t come along in the last decade, the section of the web related to us in the stock industry, on-line images, would have collapsed under its own weight.
And the big improvement is, search engines nowadays allow us to look for subject matter with multiple words: keyphrases.
A text-based photo search website such as The PhotoSourceBANK, allows researchers to find images quickly (and the photographers who have the images) by entering keyphrases to seek hard-to-locate photos.

THE NEW GRAMMAR

When you search for photos with keyphrases, don’t hesitate to take liberties with what we all learned in school to be good grammar and spelling. You can enjoy success even with misspelled words or “close enough” entries. (Can you name 5 ways to spell Muhammid Ali?) Since text takes up very few 0’s and 1’s compared to images, in a computer entering your search words.