Does the search engine affect my keywording and if so, how?
The main thing to find out is whether the search engine employs a thesaurus or not. In other words, does the search engine automatically expand search terms to narrower and ‘back-up’ terms: synonyms (words meaning the same thing, e.g. automobile and car), lexical variants (e.g. pants, US, and trousers, UK) and common misspellings? For example, if you search for ‘car’, are terms such as cars, automobile, automobiles, convertibles and vans included automatically? A thesaurus enabled search engine will generally make your keywording easier as you only need to add the most specific term and only one variation. If the search engine doesn’t have a thesaurus you need to find out if stemming is employed (i.e. ability to include variations of a word based on its stem or root) and if so to what extent it does this. Does a search for ‘dog’ bring up the same images as a search for the plural ‘dogs’? If you search for ‘swim’ will you also retrieve images with ‘swims’ and ‘swimming’? If stemming is
