superfluous/overboard with keywords

@Michelle​ Thank you and have submitted edits.

Cheers

@Michelle​ 

These are not duplicates.

Arizona-desert and desert are not duplicates. 1950s and year-1955 are not duplicates.

If I'm searching for all titles with a desert in them, the keyword arizona-desert will not help me.

If I'm searching for all titles set in the 1950s, year-1955 will not help me.

The failure of both contributors and staffers to understand how keywords work is why I find the keyword search function to be useless.

A year ago, I searched all the titles I had rated with the keyword amnesia in it. I was looking for a particular movie and could not remember the title.

I couldn't find it. It was not on the list of movies I had seen.

Later, I was able to find it via Google. The title was Somewhere in the Night (1946).

Someone removed the keyword amnesia from it. Why? Probably because it already had the keyword amnesiac-war-veteran.

Keywords must overlap. If they don't overlap, the keyword search function is useless.

@jay_spirit​ 

I agree with your examples, but some of the keywords in the original list were duplicates.

Take, for example, the keyword "graphic-full-female-nudity."

That keyword should not exist. It is a duplicate keyword and it includes the subjective prefix "graphic-."

Last October, I proposed a list of nudity keywords for merger.

Duplicate Keywords - List #57 (nudity keywords pt. 3) (Proposals for Permanent Merger and Auto-Conversion)

Unfortunately, that list was never acted on.

Earlier this month, IMDb staff revealed what had already become obvious: they will no longer act on keyword mergers proposed in this forum. 

To say I am disappointed is an understatement. This will only interfere with keyword functionality on the site and cause further chaos.

That's disappointing news re the keyword mergers. I hadn't seen that post, but I was wondering why I hadn't seen you make any more requests. I wanted to propose some myself.

It's not surprising, though. IMDb has never been able to make the keyword section functional.

I submit tons of keywords myself, but it's only for fun. It's something to do while I listen to a podcast or re-watch a movie. I don't use the keyword search. Every time I try, I'm disappointed.

From the first, the staffers themselves failed to understand its function. For years, the contributors guide told us if a movie has a keyword like arizona-desert it doesn't need desert. How can I find movies with deserts in them if titles with Arizona deserts are excluded?

Someone on this forum argued a movie in the Western genre didn't need the keyword horse because it was redundant.

Then there are contributors with wacky ideas, such as the one that all sci-fi, fantasy and animation is surreal and should have the keyword surrealism. Good luck finding a movie that deals in surrealism, because the keyword is on 11,025 titles, most of them wrong.

The keywords have always had the potential to help users find things and make lists, but it's never lived up to it.

I hope AI comes to the rescue. It seems like a job well-suited to it.

P.S. I agree some of the examples were duplicates.

@jay_spirit​ I appreciate your thoughtful comment. Keywords actually are a very useful tool -- I have often used them to find movies I would not otherwise know about, and also I love exploring which titles have certain multiple keywords in combination with each other. I do agree they could be so much better, and it wouldn't even take much work to get there. But at least for now, IMDb staff have decided that keywords are a low priority. I hope that changes eventually, but as long as keywords are a low priority for staff, I won't be spending nearly as much time contributing.

@keyword_expert​ 

I hate to hear that. I hope things change soon.

@jay_spirit​ I was already growing disenchanted with the IMDb site because of the counterproductive redesigns, and for me the last straw was the major changes made to the IMDb keyword search results pages, which pretty much "broke" the results both in format and substance. A lot of those problems still remain today, nine months later.