Search tips

[AntiqueImagery]

Full disclosure: I'm a retired research librarian. Basically that means that SEARCH was a way of life for me. In that world, we could use boolean phrasing, various other advanced search parameters as well as keyword placement to find what our patrons wanted.

Zazzle Search is pretty rudimentary. Yet, there are a couple of tricks that will help you.

1. enclose your search term in " " aka parentheses. Doing so forces your search to look for a phrase instead of separate words. E.g.: "thin blue line" instead of thin blue line.
2. within the phrase, add additional terms to narrow the focus. E.g.: "thin blue line police" forces the word Police into the mix. Only titles/descriptions having all four words will return.
3. Unfortunately this search does not recognize + and -  or ( ) within the parans term. So we're limited to basic search term manipulation.
4. Begin your search with the least number of terms, then add on terms to focus the search. This is a standard search method. Never start with a stack of terms. I usually start with two terms and work upwards. Watch the search results number at the right of the window to monitor progress. Unfortunately varying the placement of your search terms doesn't seem to effect results. My librarian genetics are having fits.
5. Lastly, just to make life more interesting, you can add parans search sets one after the other, leaving a space between each set. "thin blue line" "law enforcement". By doing so you have forced search to look for only produces containing both terms.

That's all for now. I'm going to dig a bit deeper to see if any other search tricks will befuddle the big Z

[ColsCreations]

Welcome and thanks for the tips. Will be nice to have a professional searcher in our ranks. 😃

First question for you. Your tips are showing quote marks " " but you are saying parenthesis (  )  and I am wondering which you mean because if you look at my recent thread here, quotes seem to be causing unexpected issues with Zazzle search but it's never occurred to me to use parenthesis instead.

[AntiqueImagery]

oops I was a bit sleepy. Quotes worked when I ran tests. Parans seemed to work but with some caveats. I'm running more tests to see what the Z search system will or will not accept. Wouldn't it be nice if advanced search was available?

Anyhow, the problem you had was with adding MUG after the closed terms. Using this search set of two closed terms pulls 72 results:

"thin blue line" "coffee mug"

https://www.zazzle.com/s/%22thin+blue+line%22+%22coffee+mug%22

Note the + without spaces? That indicates boolean search exists. 

"thin blue line" "coffee mug"

https://www.zazzle.com/s/%22thin+blue+line%22+%22coffee+mug%22

Yields 12 results

So the system assumes + in between all sets and single terms. %22 is quote ". The system deletes the + to simplify what the average user sees. Duh. That means you could create a full boolean search phrase if you wanted to go nuts. 

[AntiqueImagery]

dang. That should be "thin+blue+line" "coffee+mug" for the full search term. Add the + without spaces. You don't have to add + in between closed search phrases as the system assumes this. if you do want to go crazy when massive search results occur, add - but I wouldn't recommend that unless you want to dig deep into the usual mess people make of tags and descriptions.

[PacifierCity]

Try out the in store search on our store fronts...  beware... lol...

PC

..........................

[ColsCreations]

Did some more testing tonight. Zazzle search seems to ignore the plus sign and parenthesis, treating them the same as just a space, but quote marks cause serious issues.

thin blue line = 20,845 results, Refine by Category filter --> Coffee Mugs = 639 results
all mostly on-theme and actually coffee mugs (not travel mugs)  except for a number of pillar candles by same designer inexplicably coming up. Some but not all do have 'mug' as a tag but since I'm using Zazzle's navigation and not a search term to narrow results to just coffee mugs, it should be ignoring meta added by the Creator and producing only actual mugs. But that's another topic. From my trials tonight, this was the best/easiest way to search; no special characters and no product type, just your phrase followed by using the cat filter on the results page to narrow results down to product type.
thin+blue+line = same as above
(thin blue line) = same as above
"thin blue line" = 17, 805 results and cat filter & "shop by categories" options on the results page don't work

thin blue line mug = 763 results, Refine by Category filter --> Coffee Mugs = same 639 results
thin+blue+line mug = same as above
thin+blue+line+mug = same as above
(thin blue line) mug = same as above
(thin blue line mug) = same as above
"thin blue line mug" - 14 results, filter doesn't work

[CreativeLeahG]

Great information, it highlights why adding the product type in tags is not a good idea, as it makes the entire phrase redundant .... I am assuming.

[AntiqueImagery]

Not only redundant, but if Zazzle search filters redundancy, those terms might reduce accurate hits. At this point I am assuming the search here is circa 1995.

[NigelSutherland]

I imagine this is really advice for shoppers rather than creators.

[AntiqueImagery]

creators can use an understanding of search functions to optimize tags, titles and descriptions. All of which are supposed to be the bedrock of search. I have no clue what the search backend is here (by backend I refer to the search software coding). As noted, the better we can target through product metadata, the more likely customers will find what we want them to find.