I got the same Hilary when searching ‘gifts for dads’ pages of massed produced mugs
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I think to be fair to the t-shirt etc makers, that is allowed on here (as far as I know) as long as it involves their own designs… but I think when you get faced with a wall of them all from the same seller it looks awful.
Yes i had a look earlier…looks more like ebay than a handcrafted site. I’m going to stop looking again and spend that time looking into somewhere else because my shop has become invisible and I’m getting more annoyed with each day…
i agree @kokoblue I almost left a comment then thought better of it… instead of advertising how amazing it is on here compared to E they need to share our products because it might be the only way we actually get found.
Easter next week and not one of my rabbits was in the searches i did yesterday but pages from one or two sellers, all the same in different colours and more annoyingly one of those shops hasn’t been open for the past 3 years or so which I am totally fed up with because when i go on holiday my items do not show up in searches…this should be the same for every shop, half the time when i go away i leave it open for that reason.
What a waste of time this has been, time is money when you work for yourself. I kept going back to check each day thinking it would have changed and i dont want one or two items from each seller either, all of our relevant items should show up, 7 pages is clearly not enough to showcase everyones work especially when half of us make one of a kind or unique items. Rant over, I have dolls hair to finish then i might list her…perhaps under cards or artwork so she might show up ! .
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I searched something similar and got a face full of rude pants !
So I shopped elsewhere never to return 
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No 3 out of the 5 reasons, on today’s post. A kick in the stomach.
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Yep, absolutely
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Well tested, reserved judgement and verdict rubbish. Unless you specifically search for something ie black fluffy cushion you get pages that I lost the will to live and my life is too short to waste the time.
Nothing of mine came up at all. Thank goodness have a following and promote on sm daily or would be doing what others do a close my shop.
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The search is crazy. If you enter painting into the search box, the first half a dozen items that come up are jewellery, followed by plates, cups, saucers and teapots!! I’m not sure how else you could simplify the search for a painting!
Although my own shop was found relatively easily, some very well known shops are nowhere to be found unless you enter the shop name exactly. Most intelligent searches will give you the option after the first three letters.
Don’t get me started on the red price stickers which look garish and have been added at the expense of the shop name.
Was the search really so bad before? I don’t think so.
It’s bad enough that we are being squeezed out of social media by ever changing algorithms. Some people appear to be getting squeezed out of a site they are paying for and have been loyal to for many years. There will be nowhere for us to go at all soon.
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Just searched for my shop which appeared but when I clicked on the link it didn’t go to my shop - it took me to the shop I had when I first joined Folksy which I no longer use and is empty and has been for years!!
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My shop used to come up of someone typed in Sama or Samaz, if they couldnt remember how to spell it. Now you have to type in the whole shop name spelt correctly. I know this has already been mentioned already on this or another thread by other shops, but just mentioning it again to make the point!.
On searching for items, the search is just trying to be too clever, and because it is a computer, not a human, it lacks common sense so comes up with rubbish. So if you type in painting, instead of getting all the paintings that you THEN might want to thin down by using more specific phrases, instead it looks at the specific phrases on peoples items and shows you everything with the word painting on it. Likewise with the example that has been used before, ‘bear’ brings up everything with a bear on it, cards, stickers, t shirts etc. Search needs to be in two stages, firstly what, and only what, the item is e.g ‘Painting’ or ‘card’ or ‘bear’. Then a second stage, so you can narrow it down if you want a painting on a particular theme, or a card with a particular picture etc. So, using the same examples, if you want a card with a picture of a bear, stage 1 is ‘Card,’ stage 2 is bear. If you want a painting of a bear the st1 is painting, and st2 is bear. If you want a handmade collectable bear, then st1 is bear. If you want a card that is hand painted then st1 is card and st2 might be painting… etc.
Searches, generally, not just on Folksy, in an effort to try and get better are getting worse as they get more complex. They worked better when kept simple.
The other day I was looking on a particular DIY website for something to tie up some trellis in the garden. Eventually I found some things that looked good, most were blue but when I scrolled down I found a cheap and cheerful one in yellow that was all that we needed. I showed my husband. Later he said to me he’d ordered, but ended up getting the more expensive blue one as whatever he did he couldnt find the yellow one. When we looked again, it seems he never used the word “rope” - somehow the others ( even though they were thicker) came up using garden twine, or garden string or 101 other things he tried including adding ‘yellow’, but not that yellow one. Presumably whoever added that one to the website added it under ropes. Bizarre and stupid. But sums up search engines!
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And most of it is just text on a mug or shirt or whatever. It may be elitist of me, but wheres the handcrafting in that? Its just generic words in a generic typeface. Blah. Any fool can do that. Where is the skill?
Rant over.
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I missed the change to the search bar until now, but I’ll add my comments to the rest…
I like that the results don’t change as you’re typing anymore.
Restricting the results to 7 pages is absolutely terrible. Unless a searcher is really specific, most of our items have now become invisible. So if someone searches ‘bookmark’, mine don’t appear. But they appear if you search ‘Fair Isle’. So unless someone’s looking very specifically for a Fair Isle bookmark, my items are off the radar.
Irrelevant search results - e.g. a search for “sea glass”, even in quotation marks, brings up stained glass items first (no offence @JOYSofGLASS !). When the results are restricted to 7 pages, this pushes people off the already limited space given to the results.
I see people have already commented that results aren’t affected by listing date, but when searching ‘sea glass’ the only items of mine that appear are on the second half of page 7, and are ones that I’ve relisted in the last few days. If listing date is a factor, that’s a problem for Basic account holders, who only tend to relist when a listing is due to expire.
Clumping is worse, as far as I can tell, than it was in the old search.
It’s not great.
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The radio silence from Folksy is deafening.
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I think that’s why sellers are getting more and more frustrated, a total lack of acknowledgement, unless of course they are all on holiday. It should have been acknowledged days ago before sellers get totally peeved, close shop and move elsewhere.
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On the bright side it’s saving me lots of time when I list new stuff, I can just type pretty much anything into the tags off the top of my head and I can stop agonising over the word order in my titles and the keywords at the start of my descriptions, it’s very liberating! 
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It’s not just tags. The testing I’ve been doing suggests words only need to appear once, even in the narrative.
For example, I listed a fabric greetings card, and mentioned in the listing it was made using offcuts from my playmats (I was emphasising my zero waste policy).
However that single word meant it came up, completely out of context, in a search for playmats 
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I’d noticed a similar thing - I have a note in the description of several gemstone items that they are being sold off as end of line to make way for more fordite which means they are appearing in fordite searches (but after all the items with fordite in the title and tags so at least people are seeing fordite items first).
I have had to apologise to all the other glass artists on here because the new search is pushing my pieces to the almost exclusion of everyone else’s. Not my fault, nothing I can do about it and it is just one especially awful effect of the new search about which I can find nothing good to say at all. I do second third and even fourth all the specific criticisms which have already been noted.
We do now at last have a response of sorts from Folksy on the other thread. I have struggled and failed to find even the teeny weeniest sorry or hint of regret that we as customers are all obviously very upset by what has been presented to us.
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I did a search and stopped at the gift guide banner, giving this on the page customers could think that is the only page. The second time scrolled down further and found some more. This is confusing to have a banner on the middle of a search why? If I stopped you can bet others would also stop at that point thinking only 24 bookmarks for sale.
The attention span to keep customers going is small and hate to say it but if look at 3 pages give up.
Found this info:
Yet, despite being presented with pages of options during a search, almost half (45%) of shoppers say they typically don’t scroll past the second page of results , per a report [download page] from Feedvisor. The research also found that 12% of consumers limit their browsing to the first page of results.
Please remove the gift guide banner does not look right.
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Apologies everyone, we don’t want to seem like we’re ignoring your comments and complaints.
We’ll be going through everything you’ve brought up both in this thread and from the feedback button on search.
We haven’t been addressing these immediately as we’re taking time to get feedback from buyers and analysing their behaviour as well, which can take a little longer than getting feedback from sellers. As search is primarily designed for buyers it’s important we don’t just look at what sellers want, and although we know sellers can be buyers too, their behaviour can be different from someone who’s purely a buyer.
To remind everyone - this is not the final version of search, this is a first release. We will be making changes based on the information we get back.
We know the timing may seem bad for some to be changing such an important part of the site, but there’s no perfect time to do this, and we needed to make sure we avoided the busiest time of the year for the majority. We know some may think nothing needed to be changed with search, but it wasn’t something that everyone was happy with and there were limitations to what we could do with the old search. To develop it further required this change, and although it might not be at a point we’re happy with yet, we will be continuing to work on this to get it right.
Thank you to everyone that’s provided feedback so far. Although we won’t be able to go through the thread replying to everyone’s individual concerns, we are taking note of all of your comments and will be using them as we develop search further.
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