Related Search Terms

So I've started adding photographs to my blog, as you may or may not have noticed. The impetus was Mack Collier's post entitled "Your Company Blog Sucks, Now What?" in which he suggests adding images to make one's post more distinctive.

Because I didn't want to just rip off images from other websites- that didn't seem right on a blog devoted in part to extolling the value and virtues of creative work - I decided to sign up with a stock photography service. After reading this post on sessions.edu's blog, I was intrigued by the "member-generated" business model of iStockphoto and so I signed up.

While I have been able to find some apt and some not-so-apt pictures thus far - our creative director told me that "the perfect stock photo" is a contradiction in terms - the most interesting thing I stumbled across was a strange associative misogyny in my search results.

After writing a post about people lying on their resumes, I went to iStockphoto and searched for "liar," just to see what I would get. I didn't find much except pictures of people lying down and one picture of handcuffs. Then I noticed the following listed under "Common terms in this search:" "Beautiful Beauty Dishonesty Females Friendship Fun Girls."

My guess is that members tag their own work and, when you search on a certain term, the search engine then goes through the tags associated with the images and compiles the list of those terms the images have in common. In other words, the collection of terms is relatively random, made up as it is of tags applied to individual, in principle unrelated images.

Isn't it odd, however, that this "randomness" would reproduce a cultural stereotype, among the testosterone enhanced anyway, that what "beauty" and "women," even in friendship, have in common is "dishonesty"?

(Note: the picture I chose for this post was one that came up when I searched for "liar.")

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