Searching is difficult

[Barbara]

As a designer, I know a few ins and outs of searching for products and designs, but even so, I still come up with a lot of utter mismatches. For instance, I ran a search for rabbit posters and, for the most part, I saw posters, but I also saw a number of clocks. I discovered the key to this was if the designer used "art" in their keywords. But if it's not a poster, so why is it included in the search?

Then there's the fact that the customer, unless knowing enough to type in precisely what they want, will assume those clickable categories are what they're reduced to.

Clicking on quite a number of items that were blatantly AI, I found only one person who included "generative content" in their tags. It would seem the directive put out to us didn't spread far and wide, and so it's likely a lost cause for anyone to use the tag at all. It does nothing as far as I can see. Besides, why would a customer deliberately search only for AI?

Copyright infringement is likely rampant if, while searching for just rabbits, I came across designs for a Chevy Impala.

I realize there's no way Zazzle can look at each and every product individually and judge whether or not it's titled, described, and tagged correctly. (A poster described as being a luggage tag?) But can't the algorithm be better tuned, at least not using "art" as a sign that the product is a poster? I'm sure more things like this exist, but I was focused only on rabbit posters. While supplying all kinds of fancy stuff for the design tool, a little work on searching might be better for everyone.

Colorwash's Home    Colorwash on Benable   Benable invite link

[Jadendreamer13]

The same is true when searching for my own items in my store. It’s hit or miss if I can even find what I’m looking for. 😞

[Baylee]

It really is frustrating, I agree. I've wondered if it would be feasible to somehow break the search into two sections, one for product type and one for design. When you start a search if you were give the option to choose which one you wanted to start your search by, it might eliminate some of the problems. For instance if you could first narrow down the product type and then choose design search terms next (or vice versa). I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well, but maybe someone more knowledgeable about the technical side of things could chime in and provide the perfect way to set something like that up.

[Barbara]

Some years back (in the old forum), I suggested the exact same thing. We can sort of do it, but in my rabbit case, I first chose posters, but then I had to edit the search by typing in "rabbit poster." I definitely got lots of rabbits along with a few non-rabbits for some reason, but it wasn't specifically just posters I got.

The way I see it, those suggestions people can click on limit the search to designs a lot of people are posting such as "florals."

Colorwash's Home    Colorwash on Benable   Benable invite link

[Zorinda]

It’s mind-boggling that a business whose entire bread and butter revolves around customers finding the products they want has such an horrendously bad and inaccurate search function in the front end (and also back end and in images).  This problem has existed for years at this point.  Why has this issue not been addressed?  It creates a miserable shopping experience.  I’m sure that Zazzle is losing out on sales by not making this priority #1.  It’s a completely self-inflicted wound. And it’s hurting all of us.  The new creative tools are nice, but frankly with so many things broken — I don’t think I need to list them all —  they’re pretty useless if the site itself stays as crippled as it is in its current state.  

Sometimes I think that Zazzle is its own worst enemy.