Searching for police american flag or american flag police yields only 58 results. They are all t-shirts, just a handful of different designs repeated on multiple shirts assigned to different categories, often with same exact titles, tags and even image name in the design tool despite being associated with different stores. The cherry on top is that many of these results don't even have police (one of the three keywords in the search) anywhere in the tags, titles, or descriptions.
Meanwhile I have a Collection of 22 products, many of which have sold before, and all of which contain both police and american flag in the tags plus sometimes police in the title , too. I am sure there are hundreds of other products, not just mine, that use these three keywords but nothing appears in results except those 58 shirts. This is true whether I am searching on Firefox while signed in to my account, or searching as a guest in Opera with all cookies, cache, browsing history etc cleared.
I just did a search for 'flag american police' and got 6,299 results when I'm signed in and 6,288 as a guest. It's the same if I swap the word order. I'm using firefox.
I tried police american flag (no quotes or other characters) in all my browsers tonight.
First I'd clear everything (cookies, browsing data, etc), go directly to Zazzle, enter the above in search. (Anon)
Then I would clear the browser data again, go directly to Zazzle, sign in, and then search. (Logged In)
So 2/3rds of my 12 search attempts, whether in total or separately as Anon or Logged in, resulted in just the 59 shirts. That's 67% of viewers finding only the spammy results rather than the true range of products/designs available.
Since we have house, garden and car flags as product types I was thinking maybe the combo of american + flag is part of the issue so I tried searching for other things like [distressed american flag] and [patriotic american flag] and [vintage american flag] but those results were all as I would expect, it's only [police american flag] and [cop american flag] that reduce results to just those shirts.
Then I searched for [back the blue american] and got the type of results I'd expect (and happily found some of my products on the first & second pages).
If I click the suggested 'flag' nothing happens. I can't even describe it as a dead-link as it's the same as if clicking over a blank spot on a page.
If I manually add 'flag' to my search, it goes down to 151 results, most of which are shirts, phone cases, backpacks, and mugs. Thousands of products are eliminated including all mine that incude both 'back the blue' and 'american flag' in the tags.
Then I tried [police officer american] and same thing as above; got expected results but nothing happens when I click the suggested 'flag'.
If I instead add 'flag' manually, this time it says there are no results and returns results for just 'officer american' despite the fact that my collection of products alone have both 'police officer' and 'american flag' in the tags
These searches today were all all via Firefox while signed in. Not going to try other browsers & signing in and out again as it's already clear there is something very weird going on here.
One more fun fact - searching on the Zazzle app (Android version) also yields only the 59 shirts.
Issue still ongoing. Depending on browser used, results for these terms yield either only the approx 57 same spammy t-shirts or approx 7K real results but even then the first page is all the spammy t-shirts.
UPDATE:
Turns out this issue of getting different "sets" of results is not exclusive to this combination of keywords [police american flag].
The very same thing is happening when one searches for the single keyword [hallicrafters].
You can see this thread here for a breakdown of the differing search results for [hallicrafters].
