As you may or may not remember, I have participated in The Search, which was basically a contest gone wrong. Very wrong. Don’t expect quality photos at The Search, you simply won’t find much within the heaps of rubbish, stolen content and cheaters.

The concept was, free registration, and throughout a week or two, they will get five photographic tasks which they must complete. The users will then upload their photos to The Search and their photos will be given ratings (also from unregistered users).

Thus, in order to win, one would have to complete all five tasks, and get as many friends as possible to vote for them. That’s exactly why they don’t have to register, so it’s a piece of cake and you don’t get a hard time convincing them.

There are however horrible flaws with this system, both practically and both theorectically. It’s flawed by design.

Let’s consider the first problem, and I’ll start with something easy - there were no anti-fraud measures implemented. None. The votes were not even IP-restricted, so an IP could vote virtually as many times as they like (or at least, I was yet to see that limit being reached.) This alone turns the competition from a photo competition, to a cheating competition - who can write a piece of code to vote for themselves more times, and faster, or possibly run it on as many machines as possible. Ratings do not actually correspond to the actual quality of the photo, I’ve seen absolutely repulsive photos with anomalously high scores. I don’t think these people have 600 friends who are willing to vote for them. At the same time, amazing photos with unusually low scores. Cheaters didn’t get disqualified, punished or anything of that sort, since a system to take care of such issues was not implemented.

If there was some sort of system, or a system that would minimize cheating, or anything to effectively cripple cheaters, The Search would suck less, so to speak.

Even more annoying was having to visit the Apple Store for mission three, and if you went to Humac at Gammel Mønt, having to find out that they simply did not have what you need. They told me to go to a different reseller, simply because of difficulties they were having. Basically, if I don’t have a code, I can’t participate, and squeezing in another visit in my tight schedule would simply not be possible.

Interestingly enough, The Search in general was not aimed at photographers, it was aimed at teenagers and Swedes in their 20s taking pictures of their girlfriends or otherwise children (if they’re stupid enough to have them at such a young age). The “winner takes it all” prize scheme simply made the chances of winning slim (and even then if you won, the prizes are not all that good).

There was simply no “network effect” present. People don’t sign up to MySpace because they are attracted by the design (no, my eyes hurt from just looking at it), it’s all just because their friends have it, so therefor, they want to have it as well. Everyone likes using it now, and while The Search did offer a group option, it was almost never used, rendering that functionality worthless.

After begging for readers to vote and realizing that even that would simply make no difference at all and would be merely a superfluous attempt. Going the honest way wasn’t going to work, I figured. And thus, I, not being a very competitive person, simply decided to drop the whole thing. And I encourage you to do the same if you’re participating.