I have looked for my items using the tags, but haven’t seen them! I pyrograph wooden boxes/ books - when I searched for ‘book’ to check how my listing looked amongst other item I was given everything from earrings, china plates and crocheted bags to look at but no book or box! No wonder I never get any orders!!
I’m sure Folksy is lovely place to sell if you know all the tricks of the trade…
Any help is greatly received and any tips on adding URL’s to Talk Folksy topics as I can’t seem to do that either!!
x
I am sorry to say I am not sure of this myself.
Maybe change the tags on a few items, try google trends and word associations to try to find some different tags, then after a few days see what is getting more views?
I thought I knew how the tags worked but following some recent (monday morning) revisions to the search functionality things seem to have changed. Previously greater weighting was given to items that had the search term in either the tags or repeated the search term in the title and description so if you searched wooden book then all the listings with ‘wooden book’ as a tag would appear at the top (newest listing first) followed by all the listing which had ‘wooden’ and ‘book’ as tags and then everything else that features the words ‘wooden’ and ‘book’ in the listing. Now it appears (having run a few searches of my own that I had previously run) that it gives equal weighting to the words in description and tags and just orders the result with the newest first unless you use one of the other filters (highest or lowest price first). So a more recently listed wooden book mark is appearing higher in the search results than an older listing for a wooden book (even though the wooden book would be a relevant result). If you search for something like book then you are getting all the items made from old books as well as book marks and actual books.
@dougfolksy is this how the search function is supposed to work after the revisions that were made? The tags seem to make no difference to the positioning of the item in the search results its just the age of the listing.
I haven’t heard of any changes to how search works Sasha. It should be showing the most relevant items first (so the ones that have the search results in their titles, tags and descriptions, with most important placed on tags) not the newest, but let me ask Doug.
This blog post explains how tags work on Folksy @AlphaUnique and @ChelseaIllustration
Its definately not showing the most relevant items first at the moment so somethings gone awry. I ran a search for ‘new zealand’ earlier knowing that I had a couple of pendants tagged with that and there are some art prints of new zealand as well - these all came further down the results that some cufflinks which simply mentioned shipping times to new zealand at the bottom of the listing and no ‘new zealand’ tag. I also ran a search for ‘memory box’ and got memory wire bracelets that come gift boxed at the top (no ‘memory box’ tag) with the items tagged ‘memory box’ much further down.
Thanks for being so vigilant, Sasha. Can you be our unofficial site checker?
I’ve flagged it with Doug now and will let you know what he says.
something really funny is going on Camilla. I’ve just searched for hat knowing I’ve listed some hat knitting kits recently. the 2nd item that came up was some hair slides. the word “hat” was not in the title, not in the description and not in the tags. It was in the hat and hairslides category though.
Oh no! Doug says there were some updates on Monday so it looks like something went squiffy. He’s going to look into it as soon as he can.
things are really wrong Camilla
We have brooches and slides when you search for hats
We have cowls and beech bags when you search for gloves
We have key rings when you search for aprons
I’ve had a couple of obscure search results too. Just adding this comment so I get updated when it’s resolved!!
Just searched “shopping bag” and came up with lots of lovely earrings and other jewellery!
Oh goodness. This is worrying. 
I hope it’s fixed soon.
Oddly the tags were working fine if you were actually searching for jewellery. I checked last night and again this morning. Curiouser and Curiouser…
Sam x
Hmmm… so Doug’s looking into the tags and search now, but he’s not sure anything has actually changed. He says he thinks the issue with slides and things in a search for hats is because the slides have been tagged with ‘hat’. Could that be right?
He asked if you could give us some examples of things you’ve tagged with “New Zealand” @SashaGarrett as that will help us see where they appear in a search, so we can investigate further.
The problem there is that thousands of things have ‘wrapped in a cellophane bag’ or similar, in the description, so it’s finding the ‘bag’, then presenting the most recently listed first - not the ‘most relevant’ things which I’d expect,with ‘shopping bag’ or even ‘shopping’ + ‘bag’.
If people have tagged their items incorrectly/added random tags then this may be the cause.
the slides didn’t have the word "hat"anywhere in the tags , description or title , they were in the hat and slides category
the key rings that came up on the 1st page when i searched for aprons didn’t have the word “apron” in the title or tags but did have the word apron in the description as they were made from apron strings. Is that right? surely all the aprons that are tagged aprons or have aprons in the title should appear on the 1st few pages of a search for aprons.
I can see that Helen @HelenCliffordArt but as Sandra @sandranesbitt says surely if something has “shopping bag” or even just “bag” in the title and tag that should appear above anything which just mentions the word bag in the description no matter when it was listed.
Thank you for your responses. Other people’s experiences have been similar to mine when looking for tagged items, which is reassuring, but unfortunate as the system does not seem to work successfully!! Another reason to find a new selling platform maybe…?