Launching Folksy's New Search Experience

Thank you Folksy team for sorting the ‘search’. The issue had been bugging me for ages. Now I key in ‘Dog Jackets’ and mine are there right at the top! No sign of any dreaded men’s waistcoats which is what I was getting before. So pleased and now hope I will get some sales. So pleased. Thank you so much. Well done team!

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I’ve just tried a some of searches to see if I could replicate what you are seeing. When I searched ‘polar bear card’ your ‘3D Luxury Handmade Card Christmas Cool Yule Xmas Polar Bear Poppy Kay Designs’ was on row 8 of the results so it was still being found even though your title has the words in a different order to my search. Then I tried ‘cute cat card’ and your ‘3D Luxury Handmade Card Cute Cat Garden Fence - I’m So Sorry’ was in the second row of results even though the words in your title are in a different order to my search string. Then I searched ‘robin christmas card’ (figured that would give lots of results), your christmas cards with robins (multiple listings) started appearing at row 8 of the search results - not bad given there are 246 results being returned for that search.
What searches were you running? I’m intrigued to see if I can replicate what you’re seeing because with my search terms your listings are performing quite well.

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Brilliant! Thank you. Now let’s hope sales increase.

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Hi Sasha, thanks for doing a test.

I’ve just done another test for thank you card, and 50 rows came back in the search.

I have 77 thank you cards. None of them appeared in the search results.

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Actually, that is odd. If I search for “card thank you” your cards come up early in the list. I can understand that “thank you card” would prioritise things with exactly that order of words in the title, but yours ought to be further down the list somewhere.

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I think the problem is it only brings up a maximum of 200 items in the initial search, but there are 615 thank you cards ( according to that catagory from the home page) so ones that have ‘thank you card’ earlier in the title are going to appear before yours and if there are 200 of them then yours won’t show.
I mentioned this in an earlier post on this thread. If the person searches using the filter oprion on the side it tells them there are 623 Thank you cards, but still only displays 200, however some of yours do show in this filtered search.

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I think @KBCreations has hit the nail on the head with this one. For a search like ‘thank you card’ which gives a lot of results, customers could get overwhelmed if there were too many results hence the cap on the number shown. But that does mean that the algorithm has to prioritise listings (and in this case almost 400 cards don’t get shown).
This does highlight some deficiencies in the filtering options - especially the price slider which can only go down to £0-£10 which for cards doesn’t actually reduce the number of results. (I’ve fed back about that)

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I’ve discovered that there is a bit of a problem with plurals. If you search for mug, you get an entirely different selection than if you search for mugs. This applies to everything - so if you haven’t used the plural form in your title, then there’s a chance that you won’t appear in the search. If I search for doll, lots of my dolls appear but if I search for dolls, then none of them do. Given that people would probably search for ‘dolls’, then they would only find the people who had used that word in their titles.

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Hi Kim and Sasha, this is exactly my point - the search algorithm returns results in the order in which the search string appears in the listing title, and with only 200 listings being returned, my listings don’t show because my items are not titled in the way the search now operates.

I’ve done several tests and not one of my listings has been returned in the results.

The algorithm needs to be changed to not bias the results, or it needs to return ALL results, not just 200.

The prospect of manually changing nearly 1100 listings is making me shudder :frowning:

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If the search term is ‘doll’ then items with ‘doll’ rank higher than items with ‘dolls’ (or vise versa) but they are included in the results. Because there are over 200 results for ‘doll’ or ‘dolls’ the low ranking results aren’t initially shown but as you apply filters to reduce the number to under 200 the low ranking results start appearing. This would be true of any search where there are over 200 results.
Perhaps poll your followers on social media and find out which phrase they would use - doll or dolls - and then use that as your primary key word in the titles?

Whilst making my Folksy Friday board I noticed that each time a put the same search term in, or added an S on to the end of a search term, it was bringing up a completely different set of items. I’m not sure why Folksy have limited the number of items it allows browsers to see as it was very frustrating to know there were other lovely makes that I just wasn’t being allowed to look at. The initial search should inform how many results there are in total then the buyer should be able to filter those results down depending on their search criteria. We can then decide ourselves how long we want to spend browsing if we know how many pages there are to get through altogether.

Each time I got the the end of the search, I would put the same term in again and a different set of items would be shown! This shouldn’t change just because I’ve repeated it or made the search term plural. Also, please can we see more than just a few lines at a time before we have to ‘show more’. Only a little thing but would make browsing a lot easier.

On the plus side, the search was a lot more relevant and it took half the time to find some gorgeous items for my Folksy Friday board! Just a shame there were probably lots more gorgeous things that Folksy decided they didn’t want me to see :confused:

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UPDATE: Hi everyone. We have now combed through all the feedback and community observations on our new search experience and made some adjustments. We have updated this blog post with the changes and fixes we’ve implemented so far - Launching Folksy's New Search Experience | Folksy Blog

We have also updated this article about how to write listings that get seen in search results, and added an explanation of how our search algorithm works - How to write a listing that gets found in search results

A huge thank you for all your help. We will be keeping an eye on the functionality of search and we will make adjustments as needed to keep it the best Search that it can be. As always, we are open to your feedback, so please do let us know how it works for you.

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Can I please ask @folksycontent what I am doing wrong?
If I search for ‘make up bag’ none of my make up bags show in the search.
I have ‘make up bag’ as the 1st 3 words in my title, on the first line of my description, and in my tags. I definately have them in the right catagory and sub catagory.
I pressed ‘show more results’ 20 times until I was getting results that weren’t even make up bags, but none of mine showed up.
It’s the same if I search for ‘tote bag’ or ‘project bag’ . I feel like someone has ticked a box somewhere to make my shop invisible! I’m very confused, and concerned.

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@KBCreations After applying filters I managed to find you in the search results but I agree you should be further up the results than you are (for the project bag search your items with project bag in the title and description and tags were coming below items with project bag in the tags only, given what it says in the blog you should out rank those listings)
Hopefully @folksycontent can give a better answer as to what’s going on but some suggestions to try until they get back to you. The blog article refers to ‘uniqueness of a title within a shop’ all your titles are very similar within a type of product - for the make up bags only the final word changes to reflect the pattern of the fabric so try changing those up a bit to increase their uniqueness. The other thing to try changing is you have make up bag/zipped pouch in your first line - try adding in spaces either side of the / just in case the algorithm thinks bag/zipped is all one word.

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@folksycontent the blog article refers to ‘popularity’ - how are you measuring ‘popularity’?

I find this a bit concerning as I perceive it as giving a disadvantage to one offs compared to items that can be made in multiples (as an item that can be remade can be relisted and so can accumulate more likes/ sales if that is how you are measuring popularity).

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I think in this case it is actually weird. I noticed that the ones showingin a ‘make up bag’ search first had makeup as a single word without the space. So I searched for ‘makeup bag’ instead and this time got those which had a space i.e.“make up bag” ???
Signed confused . com :slight_smile:

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Thanks @SashaGarrett .
I did actually try changing some of the wording on my first line of the description, so some just had ‘make up bag’, some had ‘make up bag/zipped pouch’ and some had ‘make up bag, zipped pouch’ just to see if it made any difference, but it didn’t. I’ll try with the titles, but it’s hard when they are all make up bags!

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When the new search was first introduced I did the same search, ‘make up bag’. I got the results you got, with items that had ‘makeup bag’ with ‘makeup’ as one word, appearing first. Once again non of my items appeared in the search. I went through my listings and changed them to ‘makeup bag’ and they then did appear in the search. Since the new update, they were missing from the search again so I changed them all back. I’m beginning to despair really, my sales are so slow at the moment and if I’m not coming up in any searches then it certainly is not helping.

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Well, I’ve just done the search again and 4 of my make up bags do appear, from about the 50th item. They are the first 4 make up bags that show in my shop so I don’t know if that is relevant. I was just about to go and try and change some titles to see if it helps but did another search just to double check before I started.
I did change one of my make up bags to ‘cats make up bag’ and then did a search for ‘cats make up bag’ and it did come up but it showed the old title with the ‘cats’ at the end of the title not the beginning, so it doesn’t seem to pick up changes made straight away.
Also, if you keep schrolling in the search so many items appear that are totally irrelevent such as fused glass items, key rings, peg bags, leather wallets and more! yet lots of make up bags aren’t there

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I’m having the same problem. Just been searching for new home gifts. I have 4 listing with tags of new home and new house but after searching for new home, new house, home, house, first home…not a single one of my items come up. The search does go on to show completely unrelated items though! :angry:

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