According to Chris/Etsy Admin, you need only search for the singular form of a word and the search engine will search for the plural.
RevolvingDork says:
Plurality is handled by Etsy’s search engine, so please *do not* put both “earring” and “earrings” in your tags — you’ll be wasting a tag.
The person who posted the question to which Chris responded was concerned her earrings were not showing in the results when she typed in “earrings” because the tag used was “earring.” Her earrings were being pulled up in the results - already buried 3 pages in.
EDIT:
Search of tags and titles using either the singular or plural of a term seems to pull up identical results, but searching tags only gives a different result. A search of tags seems to only to pull up an identical match. I’ll update here as we receive clarification.
EDIT:
In an older thread on this topic, Chris explained (in March) how tags+titles and tags only searches are handled:
RevolvingDork says:
tags only will also give partial-term matches, but it’s more exclusive when it comes to long search terms.We have methods built-in to do exact term matching with quotation marks, but they’re currently indisposed as we tune the system up. They should be back sometime this month.
Posted at 4:55 pm, March 6 2007 EST
[editor-added bolding]
I guess that means “earrings” or “earring” searches of tags falls under the category of “more exclusive when it comes to long search terms.”
That doesn’t seem very intuitive.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Not quite:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5042430&page=7
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I just saw your older thread - thanks for bumping it back up. What was the final conclusion because I though the system was tweaked further after Feb when you initially posted? I’ll come back and read it later when I have more time.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:19 pm
If they’ve tweaked it, that would be nice… but if you notice, in March, RD said that we’d have quotes soon, and that hasn’t happened yet. :P
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:54 pm
That old thread reminded me how excited I was to hear about quotes coming back. I had totally forgotten then promised that would be back 2 months ago!
I think there was another long topic about searching compound words where the results were different if you used tags & titles vs just tags, even if the word was IN the tags. (i.e. the tag-only search had to be an exact match, it didn’t use the “pretty close” logic.)
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
oh- I forgot one other tidbit. Even if you are searching tags and titles, if you want to exclude a word it has to be exact spelling.
for example ” vintage, clothing NOT pattern” will exclude items tagged with “pattern” but not items tagged with “patterns”
so you have to use “vintage, clothing NOT pattern NOT patterns”
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:00 pm
JB,
I think we posted about the other search-related thread - the one mentioning compound search terms. Re: your last example, they must’ve tweaked it since Feb/Mar, because I think that’s what Elizabeth was posting about in her thread (see my edit above)
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:06 pm
I wish they would provide a section under “Help” to explain how the etsy search engine handles terms when searching tags only, tags+title, within a store, site-wide, etc.
It’s not intuitive or expected to see the search parameters change based upon the level of search.