Are you all happy with the current shop-page search engine?
PA_ThePhilosopher
Posts: 1,039
Hey guys,
I was just curious to get your input on the shop/product page search engine, and the category tree. Do you feel like you are able to find everything you need without difficulty? I know the search engine has seen a few revisions lately, and was just curious if there had been any feedback to the Daz staff on whether people were happy with the latest streamlined approach, or wehther it should be more detailed and robust.
*****UPDATE*****
SUGGESTIONS IN THIS THREAD:
- more filter options
- price range filter
- more genres & figure filters
- Daz Originals & non-PC+ filter
- more advanced/accurate search
- search by title only
- use of tags to help accuracy
- Boolean operators / AND / OR / NOT / etc.
- using quotations to search for exact matches
- More Levels in Cateogry Tree
- e.g., split Poses & Animations into separate categories
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Comments
If we are only talking baout the search for the SHOP, then I'd say I'm pretty happy with it. The search engine does what it needs to do.
My main issue is with some of the items in the shop.
When their description says "I hope you like this new item from me!" then there's not much the search engine can do. It may be the best item in the world, something I really need, but if I type in my keywords, and it does not bring this particular item up in the results, then I won't even know it exists. So I would encourage PAs to write more descriptive descriptions, listing every single prop that is included. I may not need the whole set, but if there is something in the 20 or so props that the item comes with that I need, I will buy the whole set. But if I don't know it's there, I won't buy it.
So I think it all comes down to what PAs include in their description.
Ok...I was not going to post because I didnt want to be just another complainer. But the shop is horrible. After giving up on search, I thought let me just look for most popular G3F items. V7 has got to be in the top 10 right? Nope, not even in the first 10 pages. Something is defintely wrong with the search.
I rarely use the tree beyond selecting DAZ originals. The tree doesn't allow to you to limit to V3, M3, Bryce, Carrara, shaders, etc. There are many useful options that could be added. Although obviously not everything can be added one has to draw the line somewhere, it would seem that some of these might be commonly needed.
Because the search function just grabs anything with that word, while it is vaguely useful, it isn't super-useful and turns up often many things you don't want and you have to go digging to find products that really even vaguely relate to your search. I don't know of any better way to do it since there are a near infinite number of possible search terms, and I'm glad the option is there, but ultimately I just don't use the store search a lot. Honestly I find most things either by seeing them in sales, the promotional email, referenced by other people in the forums, or showing up in a google search.
I cringe when I have to use the search feature. I can never find anything. If I don't add it to my wish list as soon as I see it roll out I'll never find it again. Same goes with Forum searching, I looked for something the other day, I got 2 entries in English and the rest of the page was nothing but German entries that went on for miles.
Honestly, if I want to find something and have trouble with the search engine, I use Google to search DAZ3D.. the search now is less than ideal, and whether you will find older items at all seems to be very hit and miss.
I really dislike the horizontal scrolling layout of the shop results. I remember the old shop where things came up as a page of thumbnails (like a vendor's store) and it was much easier to find what you were looking for.
Plus, the search engine doesn't seem to be as good as some of the older ones.
I also dislike that the store pages no longer list add-on texture packs for an item that has them, on the store page of the base item. This is particularly lacking with the PC+ collection which tends to have a *lot* of addons.
Not sure what you mean. They may be missing on some pages by mistake or whatever, but otherwise I see them on many pages.
Clicking the "Show all" button does exactly this.
For the forum: never use it. The Vanilla forum software is known for having a very poor search function.
For the shop: Seldom use it. Google is much better. One problem with the shop search is that it returns FAR too many other options. I tend to look for specific things, so if I enter a specific search, I don't want 500 products returned. Sometimes, but not all that frequently, the most relevant product is among the first entries.
The shop search should also default to showing ALL products. and not automatically hide products owned. Sometimes I need to know the product I already have is the best match for my search phrase. I don't always remember to turn that off. It's easy enough to spot owned products, and of course, the store software makes it hard to re-order them.
I find the search pretty annoying too - I wish there was an option to search product names only, for example - so if you can remember part of a product name you can quickly find it. I was searching for something yesterday and I got about 1000 hits because of this!
And I'd definitely like a way to search by or filter by software compatibiity (e.g. Bryce, Carrara)
I think the search is functional, and the ability to filter out items I own is an absolute boon. But in some other ways, it's not as robust as it used to be.
IIRC, we used to be able to filter search results by type of content (clothing, figures, vehicles, environments, props, etc). That information is still around in the DAZ backend, because each item's breadcrumb trail places it into one of those categories. But we don't have access to that now.
And god, would it be nice if it could do (with a on/off toggle) what Google does and broaden each search into a 'family' of related words. (e.g. a search for "Sci-fi" would return values that also match "SF", "science fiction", "scifi" and "science-fiction", as well as pulling out anything in the sci-fi genre of products. Now that would be a robust search function.
Older items are much harder to find using a search. I tried before searching for Dream Home, which it seems should bring up every item associated with the Daz Dream Home. I finally gave up trying on that one.
Negative. Not happy with search feature or the naming conventions. It is like a crapshoot finding stuff, even if you don't know the exact name of the item, you are in trouble since the search is not smart enough to know what to look for.
Sci-fi items are named Sci-Fi, Scifi, Science Fiction, ScienceFiction, SF and Sci Fi.
Editing standards should be applied for names of products so they can be found easily. At the very least if DAZ Store chooses nto to standardize a search for one of the above terms should pull up all items using that word.
Redirects should be added for common terms.
If you search for example Male Media and don't use the number 3 in the pa's part of the handle. It won't locate his store, even though I suspect this is a common error in name search.
If you are looking for superhero content think again. A search for superhero bodysuit doesn't even pull up the Genesis Supersuit.
It is a total mess.
Well, I'm having a splendily unproductive time trying to find an item so I can re-download it. Have not turned it up in any search I've tried.
I've found that the forums are a lot more helpful than the store for findin/identifying things...
If you use the Product Library for your account, you will be able to narrow your search down to only items you own. Won't help if you are searching for the wrong or a common word, but it might help if what you are searching for is just hidden amongst the volume of results returned.
I also just noticed there's a box "enter figure name", which I had been overlooking. So one can in fact type "victoria 3" in it to get a list of additional checkboxes to check. I wonder what else I've overlooked.
Have you tried "My Products" from CyberFox http://3dwishlist.com/bookmarklet
At least you end up with only the products you own on the shop page and can narrow the search down from there.
Not the same as an improved search function but until then....
If you're on Windows you could try this, it searches on product names only, also partial names. It's updated weekly.
http://taosoft.dk/software/freeware/prbr-daz/
It would be a lot of help to be able to search by Daz Originals only w/o PC+. We can search PC+ only - why not?
Hate having to shuffle through thousands of pictures, i.e., for daz originals when they are all mixed in with the PC+.
There is one thing computers do very well.. search and sort. It is really a detriment to Daz3d sales not to have a good search sort tools.
I suspect there are many others, like myself, that don't have time to browse thousands of items.
Go to the Florist sites, Teleflora, FTD, 1800flowers, proflowers if you need examples of excellent search and sort selection tools.
The florist industry is very competitive and they DON"T make buying difficult for customers. You want to buy something --- they facilitate it.
There are probably a million good examples on the internet.
I do appreciate the Daz3d products ordered very much. I forget often what I have bought and it helps not to see previously purchased items... ALOT.
http://www.daz3d.com/daz-originals#&filter_platClub=0&filtered=1
Hopefully I got it right this time.
Edit: Yep
A lot of us still consider the old store page layout a vast improvement over the limited functions Magento is capable of. It's got better in fits and starts over the last few years, but mainly by adding back in the large-scale customisation that we were constantly told the store was changed to Magento to avoid.
That was another customised function of the old store. It didn't just list add-ons, it had a clickable link to a search page that reliably displayed all add-ons (for things like MFD textures, etc). After being told it was impossible because Magento, for the last year or so it's being slowly reintroduced. But there's still a lot of items with no or very limited links.
All of DAZ's search options are terrible. Horrible. Awful beyond belief. And the sad thing is the store one seems to be that way by design, so that you have to stumble through a pile of alternate items to purchase before you find what you're looking for. As for the product labeling... after DAZ Studio 4 was launched, it literally took years for a lot of products that only worked in DS3 to be marked as such, I still come across descriptions that include references to promos from years ago, and the "required" product section is frequently either incorrect or inadequate. If no one at DAZ is checking and updating that kind of thing, the odds of someone creating/inputting new data for a search engine seems pretty remote.
I generally just use google for shopping searches these days, as not only does it work much better than DAZ's own search engine for scanning the catalog, but it will also frequently steer me to a similar product on another site that may do the same job for a better price. I've tried a number of the alternates for the product library search, though, and have yet to find one that does everything I want.
I have to admit to having problems with the latest version of the shop search, too. I hardly ever use it anymore. I could find more things on the old version that were specific to what I was actually searching for and I could narrow the field down more reliably by figure. When I use search now, I get way too many non related items to what I'm actually looking for and usually not in the figure I actually wanted to find it.
Its not bad, overall, but can be better. The tree is pretty good but it seems to lack a good key-word search, or the items aren't tagged in a consistant manner. Of course that takes time and effort to go into the database and tag or re-tag every single item. So that only adds to the cost of each item without adding any real benefit (outside of being able to find it marginally quicker).
For me its a good interface. Vastly superior to other shops in this industry. It can be better, but I'm still buying a lot of product so the store front isn't stopping me.
As it is, I think the store search stinks. Here's what I need to see happen to make me less frustrated with the crappy store search. More filters. For instance, I would like the option to search for Daz Originals, non-PC+, just so I can use my coupon every month for a low price item without having to spend 1/2 hour scanning through all available items to find the qualifying non-PC+ Daz Originals. Also, I think price range filters, sale combination filters, and date range filters would be nice. You may think I'm just being cheap, but I'm actually trying to get the most bang for my buck with my PC+ membership. Sometimes it takes me hours to figure out the best combination of sale items to stay within budget and get the best value, only to find one or more items have changed price since I dropped them in the cart. I think filters might help me avoid that if they were handled properly. Of course, it might help if they didn't fidget the prices so often. It's maddening frankly, but I digress.
The search and the product data have some amazing opportunities at this time.
DAZ Store search is the worst I know of. A simple search gives you multiple rows of individual side scrolling craziness that may or may not be related. Checking all of those side scrolls is just maddning. It's like searching through multiple searches to find what you originally searched for.
There are only some of them, and if you own them they don't show up.
Interesting. How did you figure out the nomenclature to use in the link URL? Is there a master list somewhere of all the parameters we can use?
I was just searching for the Super Bodysuit the other day and couldn't seem to find it.
To help aid the staff if they view this thread, I made a list of the suggestions thus far and will update the first post as well;