How do the 'Tags' work?

until I got involved in this thread I hadn’t considered how the search worked. I presumed it looked at tags and maybe the title , but looking at all the words in the description seems wrong to me. Think Folksy would get loads more sales if the search results just returned what people searched for not all this random stuff. Weird… and worrying

Yes, I completely agree - the ‘most relevant’ should come first! (and it seems to me that they always used to? else we’d have noticed before) I was just trying to say that it wasn’t being completely random, as [one of] those words did appear somewhere.

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I have 2 pendants tagged with ‘new zealand’ (words which also occur in the description) they are https://folksy.com/items/6807763-Sterling-Silver-and-Pounamu-New-Zealand-Greenstone-Necklace and https://folksy.com/items/6692179-Garnet-crystals-in-granite-silver-pendant- both currently appearing towards the bottom of the first page (out of 3) of search results after a bunch of cufflinks which aren’t tagged with new zealand but do mention shipping times to new zealand in the description (mine have a listing date of 1st June).
I’ve just done a search for ‘silver tigers eye necklace’ (again knowing that I had something (https://folksy.com/items/6861731-Sterling-silver-and-Golden-Tiger-s-Eye-Pendant) that would show up as it has those words as tags and a listing date of 1st june) and it is in the search results but after this listing https://folksy.com/items/6593542-Sparkly-Teal-Bead-Necklace which does not have any tags at all but does mention the words ‘silver’, ‘tiger’, ‘eye’ and ‘necklace’ in the listing.
I also tried adding and removing the word ‘bowlerite’ to the description and tags of some of my listings. A newer dated listing with the word randomly added to the end of the description (but not as a tag) appeared in front my 2 listings with ‘bowlerite’ as a tag in the search results and when I added it as a tag to my oldest listing and re ran the search it cropped up at the end of the search results. (I’ve now edited out the randomly added words and tags but can put them back in if it helps)
Let me know if yo want me to run any more experiements and hopefully that’s helpful to Doug.
Sasha

I’ve just been searching for some British yarn

I came across on the 1st page a listing for a birthday card with a crochet heart on it. The word yarn was in the description , not in the tags or title. There was no mention of it being british yarn and the words ‘british made’ was in the tags.
All in all my search for British yarn returned 3 lots of actual ‘British yarn’ on the 1st page of results.

I didn’t realise tags had changed until I saw this thread. This morning I was noticing there were discrepancies with incorrect items appearing when searching, say, “brooch” but having checked again this afternoon it seems only brooches are coming up under this search, which is a good thing.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, I’ve only quickly read through messages above - but there does appear to be a a subtle change in how search now works. There’s three clickable boxes also appearing: “recently listed” (the default setting), “highest price”, “lowest price”. I’m guessing this is why some of my brooches are longer featuring on the first page (as they always did), as although they have matching title and tag, they are no longer recently listed or in the highest price or lowest price bracket. I see there’s still price “groups” at the side bar to choose from, but my items won’t feature prominently in those either as their price is bang in the middle of the first price group (and I didn’t even see them on page 10!).

Hmmm, not good with change … going to have to have a serious re-think about everything unfortunately.

Elaine

@OrchardFelts - Roz have you relisted you purple hand felted beret today? Its jumped up to the top in my search for ‘new zealand’ and I can’t see that any changes to the listing other than you possibly relisting it to cause this change in its search ranking.

Yes I did - wondered why it was showing up under New Zealand until I realised it was made with New Zealand Perendale wool!

@folksycontent it really is looking like the search engine is looking for the search words anywhere in the title/description/tags, giving them all equal weighting and ordering the results based purely on which is the most recently listed. My items that are tagged with ‘new zealand’ were below Roz’s beret which just mentioned new zealand in the listing and then when she renewed the listing it jumped to the top of the search results (including over a maori style pendant (not mine) tagged with new zealand). Can Doug roll back to the search engine version we had on Sunday where it was giving greater priority to tags?

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Well represented among things not relevant to the search,but can’t complain.

It looks like there is something wrong here Sasha, and we’re going to dedicate Monday afternoon to sorting it out. Unfortunately we can’t roll back to the previous version of search because of something complicated that I don’t undertsand (Doug tried to explain it to me). But we’ll look at it all after the weekend and get it sorted. In the meantime it is still showing relevant results just not in the right order. It’s really annoying. Sorry!

Looks like I’m spending Tuesday waiting for deliveries, prepping for a craft fair and checking out the folksy search function for any more bugs then. You should see the random things that are returned when you search for ‘felt earrings’.

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Close as the crab nebula,no felt earings though.

yep, have noticed a change again today. :confused:

I have over 350 ‘bunny’ themed items in my shop. I use the words bunny and rabbit first in my tags. I uses the words bunny and rabbit in my titles. I used the words bunny and rabbit in the first line of my listings.

I just searched ‘bunny’…and not one of my products is shown until halfway down page 3! Something is seriously wring with the search on here - I always had several items on the first page until a couple of weeks ago.

Likewise I searched for something I wanted to buy - nothing of relevance turned up on the first few pages, even though I know they are sold one here…I got bored and bought elsewhere.

@dougfolksy = please, please can we have the old search back! Something has definitely changed, and it’s not for the better :frowning:

If I’m not going to have any visibility in the searches on here I might as well take all my listings over to the Dark Side - I might still not show easily in the search, but at least there’s a bigger amount of people looking for things over there so I stand more chance of being found :frowning:

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i have just done a search and some items with no tags at all ranked higher than ones with relevant tags.

Hello, all – we’ve dedicated today to looking at the search issues, and have diagnosed what was going amiss and fixed it.
Thankyou so much for spotting the issues and helping us out with examples of what looked wrong, it’s really helped us sort the issue out.
Thanks again,
Doug.

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Yay, I’ve just checked and its back to behaving how I thought it should. Thanks Doug for fixing it.

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Fantastic - thank you Doug :slight_smile:

Well done, @dougfolksy! Thankyou!

Yes ! I search for hats and I just get hats ! Thank you