RSS feeds intermittently ignoring negative search terms

[HightonRidley]

The rss feed mechanism seem to be playing up. It's intermittently ignoring negative search terms.

For example: cinco de mayo -birthday

https://feed.zazzle.com/rss?qs=cinco+de+mayo+-birthday 

still shows lots of birthday stuff for Cinco De Mayo and, after several retries, birthday items are excluded. I've noticed it over the last hour or so.

[HightonRidley]

@Scott  It seems to be permanently ignoring negative terms now 😞

This is having a really big impact on effectively promoting only what we want. For example, some places I personally promote, I don't want anything political so I use -biden -trump -politics as part of the query string search parameter.

Embarassingly, I've now promoted some political products because of this problem and have now had to stop.

Is there any estimate of a fix so I can get back to promoting where negative search terms are needed?

I don't need to point out that this can affect everyone using Zazzle's rss feed mechanism as a basis for their promoting, especially where their websites are pulling live product grids etc.

Thanks in advance for any update on this 🙂

[HightonRidley]

I mispoke, it's not ignoring negative search terms, it's treating them as normal search terms. This means that I've only been promoting political products - doubly embarassing 🤬

[SusanEileenEvan]

More than a month after the original report of this problem, I am still having problems using negative search terms. Before I was aware that it is a  known problem, I spent so much time trying and trying to narrow unnecessary products from my search. Time after time I tried...  Did I need to use more spaces? fewer spaces? Use fewer negative terms? Change the order of them? Was it browser dependent? I was so frustrated to see the search results giving the opposite result from what I expected. In the past, I had no problem filtering out unwanted results.  I finally gave up and had to choose different product categories to promote. This issue has been a huge time sink for me and is really limiting my promotion efforts!

@Scott - any update on this?

[HightonRidley]

@Scott: please can we have an update on this. Negative search terms are a vital part of promoting. It would be good to know if they are coming back and roughly when. Conversely, if there's no intention to bring them back, knowing that would be good too.

Certainty on this will help us in our promoting strategy.

TIA 🙂

[Scott]

So, search functionality has changed a bit. We've removed the negative search functionality from the search field itself and added it (and other capabilities) to the module that displays search results on the page. This means that the search functionality passes the query and results on to the search results module, which then handles a variety of tasks, including filtering out desired results. Not sure why we're doing this exactly, but I'm hoping for a response soon.

[HightonRidley]

Does your answer mean that we've permanently lost the ability to use negative search terms in rss feeds? It sounds like it but I'm desperately hoping not.

[Pádraig]

.

[PacifierCity]

I was just trying to find a way to build a link to promote a certain product for a blog post I am creating and can't find a way to get the results that I used to be able to get using the -function.  It is really frustrating.  Wondering if there is an update on this.  Is the ability gone forever.  If not how can I narrow the field of say "basket balls" down so it only shows kids basketballs and not best coach or happy fathers day, etc basketballs.  Having those come up through the link I would like to build doesn't make sense for the post I am writing.

PC

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