PixyBlog Tip #2: optimizing search

By Jacques Bron on Thursday, October 16 2008

The PixyBlog platform has a search facility that helps people find photos on photoblogs.

Is it important to have a search function on a photoblog? Some photobloggers might think it is not important. After all, a photoblog is only a way to show some photos and that might be enough...I personnaly think it is very important. Why?

Because once you have more than 10 or 20 photos on your photoblog (mine has more that 500), being able to find specific photos is important. Leaving a photographic trace on the Internet is fine, but being able to find specific photos or group of photos in that virtual show is a plus. To me, it is even more important than grouping photos in Galleries. Visitors of your photoblog might want to see all your Paris shots or all the shots you have done of a specific event or person. A good search function is also getting more and more important now as many people try to sell their photos online. A photoblog is a kind of portfolio and potential buyers need a way to find specififc photos.  If they have to browse hundreds of photos before finding what they are looking for, they will simply go away.

PixyBlog currently offers two ways to search for photos. The first and more conventionnal way is to use the search box. The search box is a text box that appears on some pages of a PixyBlog photoblog. It is very easy to use: just type one or more words in the box and press the Search button. This is a convenient way to search for specific words. But how can we be sure that the search is exhaustive? Where should we put the words we would like to be used in searches? How can we optimize our photoblog entries in order to have our visitors find our photos more easily?

Let's see an example:  I have a photoblog entry of wich title is "Minutes before the storm" and tags are "boats brittany clouds ocean sky storm". The description field of this photo contains several words like "island", "atlantic" and "coast". If I go to the Archives page of my photoblog and try to do searches with different test words, the results are the following:

Searching "storm" or any other word from the title finds this photo (and other photos wich such words in their title).
Searching "island" or "coast" or any other word from the description, finds this photo (and other photos wich such words in their description).
Searching "boats" or "brittany" doesn't find the photo, although I have entered the words in the tags field when I created the entry. 

What does that mean?

That means that the search box only searches within the titles and descriptions of the photos. Any word that you put in the tag field is ignored by the search function.

But what are these tags for?

Yeah, that's a good question. I can't imagine that the guys at PixyBlog have added the ability to tag photoblog entries only for the pleasure of it. The answer is that tags are used by the tag cloud. The tag cloud is the second method for searching entries on a photoblog.

What is a tag cloud?

A tag cloud is a visual representation of tags or keywords, in which the size of the words represents the frequency of their usage in the database. You can see the tag cloud of my photoblog on this page. The tag cloud is the group of words that you see at the top right area of the page, under the search box. Although my tag cloud is still in its early stage*, it is easy to see how it works. The words I have used for tagging my photos are shown in the tag cloud. The bigger the word appears, the more I have used it in my photo tags. Each tag is a clickable link. When a user clicks on a word in the tag cloud, they will perform a search on the tag word and display the list of photos that have been tagged with that word. This is another useful and efficient way to search for photos.

What type of search should I favour?

Well, it depends on the usage you make of the title, description and tags when creating your photoblog entries. Some photographers often use wacky titles for their posts. Some (like me !) just call their photos "Untitled #1", "Untitled #2", etc. and sometimes, they are lazy enough for not adding any description for their photos (I am also occasionnaly concerned by this) ;-) . Doing so, their photos, while sometimes beautiful and highly appreciated will be difficult to find, unless the tags are well selected and the tag cloud is clearly displayed and regularly used by the visitors of the site.

Of course, the best way to ensure a good search facility on your photoblog is to use all the available elements for describing your entries : title, description and tags. But you will be more efficient if you know in advance what will be searched by the search functions of your site (search box and/or tag cloud). The next step is to intelligently display the search functions and maybe help your visitors understand what they will search for when they use the search box or the tag cloud. This is what I have done on my photoblog, by slightly changing the template I have added a little explaination text just before the search box and before the tag cloud, to help visitors use the search tools.

I hope this post will help you understand the search functions on your PixyBlog photoblog and help you optimize the search functions.

In a future post, I'll explore the templates where the search box and the tag cloud are displayed and I'll show you how to customize them

P.S.: You can get a 10% discount on your PixyBlog subscription by entering the following referral code: ZGXCEP0Y7LSK.

Enjoy!