Recently the MP seems to have changed how to narrow search results. There used to be words you could click to narrow your choices- like "modern" "ornate" "simple", etc. Those seem to be gone...and less descriptive icons have taken their place? I do not find them as helpful. What do you all think?
For example, when searching trivets - these are the circle icons I get to narrow choices
They introduced this late October
general-zazzle-discussion/hot-tags-are-now-thumbnails
I really like it and notice now that the suggestions appear at both the top and bottom of the page. Nice. 👍
The text that goes with them is the same as it was before. They're tags used on products in the group of results you've already fetched. Then you use those tags to narrow results down further and so on. So it might be as brief as "pink" or as detailed as "waterfall colorful bright art". It's just that instead of getting just the text we get a design picture with it now. I have no idea how the algorithm decides which tags to pull for each narrowing-down, or which design image it decides to use from the products in that tag group for the thumb, but it does remind how important it is to write tags that actually match the design.
If I search for "black necktie" - these are the "narrowing" choices I get. REALLY? Team mascot and tiger...moreso than 'traditional' or funky or plaid or floral? Help me understand. I find it very disheartening. Unless a customer puts in a VERY specific search string - most products will never be found with these new "narrowing" groupings.
I looked at the other linked thread and while Scott does say "These are actually suggested/related search terms, not product tags" that may just be a matter of semantics because it's easy enough to do your own search and drill down through the suggestions and see they are product tags. In my first post, you can see in the screenshot that after I searched for [tie dye tissue paper] and then clicked the [decoupage] suggestion, the next level of suggestions includes [NameName Name Name Name] which takes you to five products obviously by the same designer who uses that as one of their ten tags. The only thing that makes [NameName Name Name Name] related to tie-dye and decoupage is that the designer used it as a single tag along with [tie-dye] and [decoupage] in other tags.
I started my search by typing in [tie-dye tissue paper]. That gave me 574 tissue papers that have [tie-dye] in tags and/or title.
From there, clicking the "decoupage' suggestion narrowed it down to 17 tissue papers that have [tie-dye] and [decoupage] in the tags and/or title.
From there, clicking the "NameName Name Name Name" suggestion narrowed it down to 5 tissue papers that have [tie-dye] and [decoupage] and [NameName Name Name Name] in the tags and/or titles.
Once we get to the mere 17 results for tie-dye and decoupage, the pool of tags to pull from for the next level of suggestions is pretty small, especially since they're all from the same seven designers and as designers we tend to use many of the same tags on similar designs. The algorithm pulled [NameName Name Name Name] which was used on 5 of those 17, [asian influence] which was used on 5 of those 17, [furniture flipping] which was used on 5 of those 17, [rainbow colors] which was used on 6 of those 17, and so on.
I have no way of knowing but I really don't believe it has anything to do with sales or popularity or favoritism, I think it's just randomly pulling tags which progressively leads to smaller pools for the next level to pull from which naturally might lead back to one particular designer.
I just can't make sense of the algorithm with the black neck tie example.
When you search for that, you get the narrowing choices below. I have to believe tags like "plaid", "elegant", "floral", "striped" are more plentiful on ties than "sports", "cross", or "Jesus"....so I can only conclude the algorithm chose those narrowing words bc they....what? Sell more? Why else those (relatively) obscure categories? I dunno. It is what it is, I guess.
To try to test the theory of the suggestions being pulled from popular/good sellers, I went here to look at Best Sellers
https://www.zazzle.com/bestsellers and then changed the sort to "best selling all time".
The all-time best seller across all of Zazzle (which is still the #6 best seller this week) is a men's t-shirt that uses these tags
gift
birthday
boyfriend
girlfriend
y2k
bubbly
hearts
relationship
teen
Signed-in, I get these suggestions:
Browsing anonymously as a guest in a different browser I get these:
Either way, as you can see, none of the suggestions were pulled from the tags and/or title of that best-selling shirt. (As a matter of fact, the shirt doesn't even appear anywhere on the first 5 pages of results although knock-offs of it do.) Also notable is that there is no way to get from these suggestions to that most-popular-ever shirt because the shirt doesn't contain any of those words in its tags and/or title.
I tried this same approach with two other things (playing cards and name badge) in the top five on the best-sellers lists and same thing - the suggestions don't trace back to the tags of the best-selling item in that product category. So again, I can't know, but I really don't think the suggestions have anything to do with what's popular / selling the most. They seem to be pulled at random.
Looking back at the [NameName Name Name Name] suggestion I referenced before, those same five products it's pulled from also use "blue & white" in their tags which is a meaningful visual match to the designs they're on. So if the algorithm was smart and not random, it would be pulling [blue and white] as the text suggestion instead of [NameName Name Name Name] which isn't meaningful or helpful.
(Note, I am not implying a designer did anything wrong here with using their names as a tag. I actually think that's a pretty smart thing to do. I'm just using that very unique tag for a good example of the relationship between the filter Suggestions and tags.)
Let's say you have a rustic, orange pumpkin pattern shower curtain. Let's see if your product is easily found.
Customers often want to match colors, so to start, they search for "orange shower curtain". These are their "narrowing" choices:
We want them to find yours...so we click on 'pattern' to narrow the choices. This comes up:
Tiger, animal, safari, pink, boho. Which will I click on now to find the rustic, pumpkin pattern curtain?? 🤔
If I wanted something that specific I would just search for it by typing in [rustic orange pumpkin pattern shower curtain]. Which I did and believe it or not got two shower curtains as results, both of which contained rustic, orange, pumpkin and pattern in the tags and/or titles. 😉
I feel like suggestions are probably mostly clicked by people browsing randomly; people looking for something specific would be more likely to type what they want as a search or use the category tree.
