I'm looking for some specific Christmas gifts and search is worse than usual. I'm looking for a specific item in vintage gold jewelry and even with narrowing down search by all the drop drowns and trying a few different phrases, it's still not working. Like at all, worse than usual. I'm search "vintage gold ...." and firstly, it's not defaulting to vintage. Secondly, silver items are popping up. Lastly, it's bringing up the general category that my item falls under, but is less specific than what I'm looking for. Like, say I'm searching cuff, and it's bringing up bracelets that are not cuffs, when I already specified cuff.
Next, I started looking for something in vintage art supplies, visual arts, painting. It's bringing up things that are not used for painting, like scrapbook ephemera. I am looking for something for someone that paints, NOT scrapbooks. Even if it was designed to be "serendipitous", as they like to say, the drop down menus should allow you to eliminate what you don't want, but either they aren't working or a lot of sellers are listing things in the wrong categories. It's wasting my time and I am only willing to spend my money on what I am actually looking for. I will probably end up settling for an Amazon gift card because it's too hard to search here.
I don't understand why it's designed to do anything other than find you exactly what you are looking for. It makes no sense. There is NOTHING to be gained by making this so bad.
@JMOldeVintage This was also my experience with trying that particular hack to get more relevant search results. I noticed that many listings shown in initial search that were in fact 100% relevant disappeared when I did that. And those were just the ones I noticed right away...who knows how many more that I never made it to on pages 11 & 12 that were relevant didn't get shown to me. I give up.
On a thread I read here recently someone made the suggestion that Etsy may do this purposely to push buyers onto Google offsite ads. Seems unlikely to be the reason for the useless search results here. Thoughts?
Perhaps to get people to buy ads ON Etsy? That's a huge source of revenue for them.