Archive for Search
March 11, 2009 at 11:19 pm · Filed under Checkout System, Payments, Search, Seller Opportunities, Showcase, Site Security, Site Use, The Future · By JB
The Head of Etsy’s Product Team has posted an update on their progress and projects for the coming months.
Source: The Storque
Sara recaps the changes from the past several months including Google Analytics, beta testing of API, the Etsy Shop application on Facebook, and changes to the RSS feeds.
She also mentions features which had previously been promised but have now been put on the back burner, including more tools for Etsy teams, and the Super Etsy Mini.
Key points in their plans for the coming months include:
- “Search is our top priority for 2009. We anticipate numerous updates to Search throughout 2009.” (more details are available in Product Manager Sean Flanagan’s Storque article here.)
- Payments: There is currently a seller survey about payments, which Sara did not mention but that will possibly result in some new payment options being incorporated into Etsy, such as google or RME. Sara only mentioned changes which have already occurred such as sellers being able to pay their bills with paypal, and the fact that Etsy now employs a collection agency.
- Checkout: In the coming months we will be working to better clarify the functional elements of the overall (checkout) process, including introducing inline registration (i.e. letting first-time buyers checkout on Etsy without forcing them to confirm their registration first).
- Safety, Security, and Trust: No specific details are given here, but Sara says “While it may not always be possible for Etsy to disclose its fraud deterrence practices…Etsy takes these issues very seriously and thus we continue to update our infrastructure to keep fraudulent behavior off of our site.
- Showcase: In March you will see improvements to the design of Etsy’s Category pages and, more specifically, the design of the Category Showcase promotional modules at the top of those pages. …
In the coming months, we are looking to expand Showcase placements to other relevant areas of our site to provide more opportunities for sellers to gain additional exposure. (ed:this is possibly related to Sean’s mention of possibly selling paid ads on the search results pages.)
- Seller Tools: In the next month, Etsy plans to release tools to allow sellers to rearrange the items in your shop.
- Site Performance: Sara does not mention any details, but refers readers to Chad’s recent article here which goes into detail about site performance.
Sara closes with the promise of more regular updates:
I’ll be back with regular updates on what we’ve accomplished from this list and what else we have lined up for the remainder of the year.
For the full text of Sara’s article please see The Storque.
Commenting is closed for this article, but there is a forum thread open to comments.
March 9, 2009 at 10:11 pm · Filed under Search · By JB
Today the Etsy search has made several small changes.
- Search dropdown menu choice has been made persistent. Previously, when performing a search under Vintage for example, the search dropdown menu would switch back to Handmade after clicking to view an item in the search results. Your dropdown menu choice is now persistent when searching under Handmade, Vintage, Supplies or All Items—until you change it. We’ve also made it easier to return to your search results from an item listing page—just look for the “Search Results” link in the breadcrumb navigation below the Etsy logo.
- Search result sort order has been made persistent. Similarly, if you like to sort search results by price for example, Etsy will remember your preference and allow you to keep sorting search results the way you want to for the length of your session on Etsy.com, until you decide to change it (or open a new browser window and start a new session). This is another small way to help make Etsy more searcher friendly.
- A price filter has been added to search results for Materials. You can now set a price range for search results under Materials—look for the price filter under Search Tools on the right.
Search issues Etsy is working on now include:
- Simplifying the Search Dropdown Menu
we will be including an option to search descriptions for Handmade, Vintage, Supplies and All Items on search results pages, and making the search dropdown menu exactly that: Handmade, Vintage, Supplies, All Items. The other existing search dropdown options such as “Materials” and “Sellers: usernames” will still exist, as will the search dropdown options available from other areas of the site.
(ed: since May 2008, Vintage and Supplies have been unsearchable by description, this change will restore that function.)
- Improving Accuracy
Our goal is to give browsers and buyers an option to sort search results by relevancy, in addition to recency, to help them find items of interest.
…
Our current work on relevancy involves weighting some item fields more than others. What do we mean by weighting? We mean the importance attributed by the search engine to the types of fields being searched. For example, to return quality search results by relevancy, we may find we need to give item tags slightly more precedence than titles and significantly more precedence than descriptions.
- Redesigning the Listing Process
we’re focused on redesigning the item listing process, which is really where it all begins when it comes to search on Etsy.
…
We’re taking a thorough look at Etsy’s category structure and our current use of tags. Incorporating more structure here will ultimately enable category-specific filters on search results pages, allowing users to narrow down their search intuitively. It will enable multiple ways to shop: for example by category, by recipient, by material or by technique.
…
Expect improvements throughout 2009. Details will be announced on the Etsy Blog, in the Etsy Forums and to the Etsy News email list.
Other areas Etsy is exploring include:
things like links to related searches on search result pages, spell-checking functionality to suggest searches for misspelled words, advertising options for search result pages and many more features we’ll discuss as they near completion
Other useful Information:
Etsy is beginning a series of Virtual Labs where they will give anyone interested access to a test area to try out different searches and discuss the future of Etsy search. The first of these sessions will take place this Friday, March 13 at 1:00 pm EDT in the Virtual Labs.
Source: this Storque article
Coommenting on that article is closed but you can discuss it or ask questions in this Etsy forum thread.
March 9, 2009 at 9:21 pm · Filed under Search, Site Maintenance, The Future · By JB
Etsy’s Chief Technical Officer Chad Dickerson wrote an update today on Etsy’s technical progress and plans for the coming months.
Key points included:
- Monitoring and Communication
we rolled out a sophisticated monitoring system in November that today enables us to keep an eye on 700 services running on over 170 pieces of hardware, including servers, network gear and storage systems. When there is an issue with one of our systems, our engineers are proactively alerted. The monitoring system performs over one million automated checks every day — about 12 checks per second — and notifies us of any problems 24×7.
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We also use a third-party service from Gomez to proactively measure page load times for Etsy at various points around the world. Gomez (which is used by 14 of the top 15 most visited sites on the Web) is an incredibly rich information source and tells us how fast Etsy’s home page is loading right now in Los Angeles, or last week in Madrid or the average for the world last Tuesday.
- Performance and Scalability
our performance as measured by our own systems and Gomez has vastly improved in the past six months even as site usage has grown considerably. In other words, the changes we have made to our systems and approach are demonstrating scalability. The numbers from Gomez, our third-party measurement service, tell the story in clear measurable terms. Our home page now loads 2-3 times faster in most locations around the world compared to October and as much as nine times faster in some places
…
We achieved some of these improvements by using the services of Akamai, a web infrastructure company. Akamai directs 25% of the world’s Web traffic using 40,000 servers in 70 locations around the world.
- Search and Developer API
When I arrived in September, Etsy’s search function was unacceptably slow, plain and simple. As I wrote in that update: “Some searches are taking as long as 60 seconds to return results and others are timing out altogether.” We began work on Search immediately. You should have noticed speed improvements in search and across the whole site beginning in November as we improved existing search and eventually migrated the backend entirely to a widely used open source platform (Solr) in January.
…
In February, the Etsy API has also been released to a small group of developers and a public beta launch will follow soon.
- Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, our goals in the Engineering Team are very simple: to continue to refine Etsy’s technology architecture towards a high-performance and scalable model, and to deliver the new features to buyers and sellers in the areas described in Maria’s update on Etsy’s priorities for 2009.
Source: this Storque article
January 5, 2009 at 3:08 pm · Filed under Search, Site Use, Tags · By quirke
In this Storque article, Etsy announces a significant change to its search function.
This week we are replacing Etsy’s existing search technology with Solr, an industry-leading, open-source search system. Solr is currently in use by major consumer sites like NetFlix as well as important e-commerce sites like Zappos. We believe it will provide Etsy the foundation to scale in terms of both speed and functionality.
You may recall that Maria Thomas, Etsy’s CEO, recently mentioned that we are going to be focusing on search in 2009 and that we intend to orient Etsy’s search function more to buyers’ needs. This first phase launch of Search is the first in what we expect to be a series of improvements to Etsy’s search function throughout the year.
For this initial launch we primarily focused on improving the speed with which search results are returned on Etsy. We believe you’ll notice immediate and significantly faster results though specific return times will vary based on your location and type of connection.
In addition to speed improvements, the Solr technology is smarter than our old search technology in how it handles certain queries. A specific improvement worth mentioning is the way in which the new system handles searches containing compound words. In our old system, a search for “notecards” would bring up items containing “notecards” in the tag, title or description field, but items containing only “note cards” (two separate words) would not show up in results. With our new search system, searches containing compound words like “notecards” or “hairbows” return all associated items.
There’s no need to make any updates to your item descriptions and tags to accommodate these improvements but this launch is a great time to remind sellers about the importance of accurate tags, titles and descriptions. You can find more info on how to best tag items in these tagging how-tos.
Future phases of Search will include upgrades to the relevancy and ranking of the results. The way current search results are displayed (ranking) is based on chronology (most recently listed items first). We believe that Etsy buyers will be better served by a system that takes into account both ranking and relevance in a way that helps them find items they’re looking for according to various criteria by category. And, for those buyers who may not know what they’re looking for, we also hope to introduce later in 2009 tools to foster discovery based on all the hearting and curating that takes place across the Etsy community every day..
While our main goal with search is to help buyers find what they’re looking for, we are mindful that sellers want various options to promote their items on Etsy. Redesigning the search function and creating new ways for sellers to advertise on Etsy are two important initiatives that are in the works for the first half of 2009.
Our new search system will be launching later this week; we will update this note when it’s actually live. We look forward to your feedback.
You can comment in the accompanying thread.
Information on Solr is available here.
Update by JB, January 8, 2009: The changes to search are now live in production.
December 9, 2008 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Etsy Communications, Search · By dangerousmezzo
In this thread the new Vice President of Product Management, saralouhicks, announces that thanks to the input from Etsy buyers and sellers, search pagination will be changed back to show the total number of pages returned, probably by the end of this week. Here’s an excerpt from the thread:
Some valid points were raised, which include:
SEARCH: The way current search results are displayed (ranking) is based on chronology (most recently listed items first). We believe Etsy would be better served by a system that takes into account both ranking and relevance in a more sophisticated way. In retrospect, the change we made to pagination would have been more appropriately introduced with the introduction of a new ranking and a relevancy-based system.
JUMP TO: There is a “jump to” box at the bottom of search results category pages, but without knowing how many pages there are, it’s illogical to jump to a page deeper in the results. If the shopper jumps too far, they meet a message that says “we didn’t find anything.”
In light of these two critical points, we’ve decided to reformat the pagination display to include the last page number again (such as it appears here in the Forums). The Etsy engineering team is working on this right now, but we have testing to go through yet. We are aiming to release the change before the end of the week.
I want to apologize for the way in which this change was launched. With the changes to the search system coming up in the new year, we may revisit the pagination display, but I assure you that we will take into better consideration how pagination supports the overall functionality of search.
Update by JB:
The fix is live, right now, today. It won’t take a week of testing after all.
(editorial: YAY!!)
source: this forum post
stellaloella says:
More good news! Our testing went smoothly, so we were able to push the change live just moments ago.
Posted at 6:35 pm, December 9 2008 EST
December 4, 2008 at 7:49 pm · Filed under Categories, Search · By JB
Etsy has changed the pagination display in search results and categories.
For an example see here
the page numbers are now displayed as
173980 items 1 2 3 4 5 …
The old system would show the number of the last page too, like this
173980 items 1 2 3 4 5 … 8285
Now there is no link to the last page and no way to quickly jump to the last page. The ellipses are not clickable. You have to page forward one at a time using the arrows, or use the jump button (without knowing what is the max number you can type in).
Admin replied in this forum thread
stellaloella says:
This is a new, small change we just made. Etsians are so observant, we can’t slip anything by unnoticed. ;)
As I mentioned in another thread moments ago, this pagination change was made primarily for the the search results & categories pages. We will try to get the Your Etsy view tweaked to show a quick link to the last page for easier shop management.
Etsy’s reason for this change is explained by Stellaloella
stellaloella says:
There’s sort of a psychology of online shopping to this change. Our usability testing revealed that casual shoppers can get overwhelmed by seeing there are so many pages of results. The thought kind of is, “I have to look through 500+ pages of scarves? Oh my!” So showing just a few pages at a time makes the browsing experience feel more manageable (even if the total number of results is still up there).
Posted at 4:49 pm, December 4 2008 EST -
Another side effect of this change will be that sellers will have to renew more often to constantly stay in those first 5 pages of results, which is all a buyer will know exists.
Originally the new pagination system was also applied to alchemy, favorites, pages within our shops, but users complained and Etsy changed it back, just for those areas. (not for search and categories)
In this forum thread Marymary says
marymary says:
Hey guys!
So glad you noticed, and yes with your positive feedback throughout the day we have added a final page back to Your Etsy pages, Alchemy pages, Shop home, and Favorites.
UPDATE: December 9, 2008 — Search result pagination will be restored to its original form
November 3, 2008 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Etsy Communications, Etsy Staff, Search, The Future, The Storque · By GreenMamba
Today Etsy published this very informative article by CEO Maria Thomas.
In it she shares her experiences meeting with a few Etsy Team members, introduces some new hires, addresses a few ongoing community concerns, and details some upcoming feature changes and upgrades.
Excerpt:
Search
One immediate and urgent project involves architecting substantial improvements to Etsy’s search function. During the next week or two, you should see marked improvements in the speed at which Etsy’s search function returns search results (note: this refers to the speed with which users received results to a given query). Many of you and many inside Etsy want to improve search in other ways. That’s coming too, but I think speed trumps all, especially in the holiday season.
We also plan early in 2009 to begin to change the way Etsy’s site search actually works. It was originally designed to return the most recently listed items first. As a result, Etsy understands that many of its sellers renew listings before their original expiration dates in order to push items closer to the top of search results for a particular query.
I believe that Etsy must design its site search with buyers in mind. Its main purpose should be to help buyers find what they’re looking for. Returning items in reverse chronological order isn’t the best way to achieve that. At the same time, Etsy should provide sellers with various options to advertise and promote their merchandise to Etsy’s enthusiastic and growing buyer base. Redesigning the search function and creating new ways for sellers to advertise on Etsy are two important initiatives.
Find the complete article here and the companion forum discussion thread here.
September 25, 2008 at 12:23 pm · Filed under Categories, Listings, Search · By GreenMamba
In this Storque article, admin stellaloella follows up on Etsy CTO Chad Dickerson’s Honest Beginning article, speaking frankly about the current state of Etsy’s search feature and the lag time in batch loading to category pages.
Excerpt:
Last week Etsy’s new CTO, Chad Dickerson wrote an honest account of some of the technical challenges Etsy.com is currently facing, specifically in reference to the search function. In that article, Chad mentioned some new hardware and “other tweaks” to improve things. Many of you may be curious about what we’re working on, how it’s helping and how it will impact your ability to shop and sell on Etsy. So let’s get right into the nitty gritty …
New Hardware
Without getting into too many technical details, last week we added some new hardware with the goal of improving speed. We’re happy to say so far it’s helped, and some of our slowest queries more than doubled in speed. This is a great improvement, but still below our internal goals — which means there is more work ahead. The Engineers are continuing to monitor search speeds and page load times.
The article goes on to address the following topics:
Simple Searches Redirect to Categories
Limited Number of Search Terms (or “My nots are not working!”)
Batch Loading in Search and Categories
What Does This Mean For Sellers? (or “How will shoppers find my items?”)
Excerpt:
Looking Ahead
Chad and the Engineering Team are working on longer-term solutions to our current search issues. We don’t want to disrupt site performance during the holiday shopping season, so in the meantime, the above measures are aimed at the goal of ensuring people can find and purchase the many incredible items available on Etsy.
We’ve closed commenting on this article. If you would like to comment, please join the discussion in this Forum thread.
July 2, 2008 at 2:42 am · Filed under Search, Site Use · By JB
Etsy has gotten rid of the old “brick wall” graphic that you used to see when trying to access deleted shops or accounts that never existed. The new error page has links to continue shopping. This improves the navigability of the site and is much more buyer-friendly than the old brick wall, which had no navigation links.
June 26, 2008 at 12:57 pm · Filed under Features, Search · By GreenMamba
Now, users can easily switch between searches for Handmade, Supplies and Vintage.
kfarrell says:
Here’s latest TechUpdate from the Storque: http://www.etsy.com/storque/section/etsyNews/article/tech-updates-prompt-to-switch-between-searches/2106/
“Since we launched separate drop-down searches for Handmade, Supplies, and Vintage items, we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from buyers and sellers. Thank you to everyone who let us know what you think of the changes — we’re listening!
We wanted to make switching your search between Handmade, Supplies, and Vintage a little easier, so we’ve added a little prompt to the top of the search results page. If you search in Handmade, links to perform the same search in Supplies and Vintage will appear. Searches in Supplies will show links to Handmade and Vintage, and searches in Vintage will show links to Handmade and Supplies.
We hope these changes makes searching on Etsy a little easier for you!”
Posted at 12:38 pm, June 26 2008 EST
Quoted from the companion thread, which can be found here.
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