why don't items appear in search when i used keyword to search?

[sunshine Juneberry]

I decided to try a search for my own items to see how easy they are to find. I use uniform and military in all my items keywords. I typed in uniform into search and only about 10 of 40 items showed up in search. I thought maybe i hadn't put the word uniform into keywords on the items that didn't show but when i looked....there it was.

I'm just curious what i didn't do right, or what i need to do for these items to show up in a search.

[Chelsea Malibu]

Are you talking about the marketplace or in world?

[Ann Otoole]

try making any change to your listing and update. Do not use the SKU. If you need to make sure no numeric digits are in the SKU as this removes it from search. Better to have a blank SKU since it is clearly defective.

Also, forgive me if you already know, keywords are in a seperate data entry field. Only name, features, and the keywords sections are indexed. Nothing in description can be searched.

[Ziggy21 Slade]

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Ann Otoole wrote:

try making any change to your listing and update. Do not use the SKU. If you need to make sure no numeric digits are in the SKU as this removes it from search. Better to have a blank SKU since it is clearly defective..

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Whaaaaaa!? I know you know your stuff Ann, but I have 500 SKUs to remove, so you are sure - right? 

[Pamela Galli]

I don't know anything about skus except not to use numbers for some reason (thought they would just not work, this is the first time I have heard they would remove you from search), but just want to make sure you know you should be able to delete them in bulk edit.

[Couldbe Yue]

I know I'm going to regret asking this but it's going to be the icing on a cake of LL incompetence if my fears are correct..

 

is it just numbers or is it all non alpha characters?

[Toysoldier Thor]

when did this new search engage that would have fallen to this "numbers in the SKU" bug?

If it was early August, this could explain why as of the first week of August my sales plumeted to about 50% of normally highly stable weekly sales.  They have never recovered since early august.

My MP products all have SKU info of which there are #'s in the code - not pure numbers like "32423" but like "sculty-water-1"

And why is this little tidbit secret of a MP Search bug only coming to light within the forums and only now?

Is this a Jira that I missed?  Is LL fixing this bug?

[Ann Otoole]

I put alpha numeric skus on several products that sold well in world. They never sold on SLM all this time. I deleted the skus a week ago and am making sales on those items all of a sudden. So yes I am a firm believer that the SKU field can be deleted and all skus nulled in the database.

 

Or was it making an update got it back in the index? Either way I will never use SKU and will be making frequent updates now.

[Toysoldier Thor]

actually i checked again and none of my MP items actually have a # in them.  They all have a DASH special character but I am assuming that is not affected by the search bug since even though my sales slumped ever sing August, they did not stop dead like you noticed Ann.

[VonGklugelstein Alter]

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Ziggy21 Slade wrote:

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Ann Otoole wrote:

try making any change to your listing and update. Do not use the SKU. If you need to make sure no numeric digits are in the SKU as this removes it from search. Better to have a blank SKU since it is clearly defective..

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Whaaaaaa!? I know you know your stuff Ann, but I have 500 SKUs to remove, so you are sure - right? 

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lol.. try 1200 ..  search has no issues picking up my numeric SKU's.

[Ann Otoole]

Well aren't you lucky. Maybe the trick is listings have to be updated from time to time or the indexer fails to include them or the indexer only indexes so many in last update descending order.

[Couldbe Yue]

I don't know anymore.  The only thing I do know is that everything LL deploys is such poor quality that sadly this is within the realms of probability.

So, I went through and not only deleted all my sku's but also any data in my version field.  It may work or it may not. That's as much effort as I'm willing to put in to try to work around this ailing hulk.

 

[Ciaran Laval]

There was a bug whereby if you searched for the SKU and it had numbers in it, you would not get a result.

So for example if you had a SKU of Myproduct11, and searched for Myproduct11, it wouldn't be found. I think this has been fixed, I can search for my own items by SKU with numbers in the code.

Having said that, if I do a partial search for my SKU, then nothing gets returned, so maybe that's the bug. So if my item was Myproduct11 and I searched for Myproduct or Myproduct1, I'd get no results, if you have all letters, you seem to be able to do partial searches.

[Ann Otoole]

I'm leaning towards the freshest updates are searchable more than the sku thing. So by you updating your listings you may see better resust. Now we will have an update listings war lmao.

[Couldbe Yue]

well for those people who have too much time on their hands and not enough to occupy themselves I say good luck to them. For me it's almost academic as I've got better things to do with my time but I'll report back if I notice any change. 

[Darrius Gothly]

Regarding Numeric SKU's: They do NOT remove the product from Search. They DO prevent you from using the SKU to find the item when searching for Related Items. I have several products that rank well in MP Search and have numeric SKU's.

 

[Ann Otoole]

So that leaves us with some items that were imported from xstreet, edited, and left to lay fallow fell out of search and by making any recent update they suddenly reappeared in search.

[Darrius Gothly]

Which would lead one to infer that newer items get a slight ranking boost over older items. It could also be that "dormant" listings ... those that haven't been touched/edited for some time ... are down-ranked in search. The latter would make more sense but .. both are equally plausible.

[Zanara Zenovka]

Oh good grief.

Last thing I knew, items slipped down the search ranks for a few days whenever you updated them. This has changed?

/boggle

Although not much would surprise me atm - I recently saw that the top result for one search I analysed had no content at all in the features or keywords, just had a match on words in the name, very low price ($L5) and 45 (mostly old xstreet) ratings/reviews, which would lead me to think that it has never been updated since the migration.

[Darrius Gothly]

And this, gentle reader, is exactly why trying to comprehend what they've done with Search is so futile ... they've so completely twisted it that for every theory you develop, there are more than a handful of examples that break it to smithereens.

You could look at it as LL's way of ensuring exposure for a wide range of products ...

[Zanara Zenovka]

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Darrius Gothly wrote:

 

You could look at it as LL's way of ensuring exposure for a wide range of products ...

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LOL if only...

Thing is, from what I can tell, it only seems to return a very primitive result set of any items that have the search term/s somewhere (in title, features or keywords), irrespective of frequency, then applies ranking based on ratings/sales (and ?cheapest price).

Which means that when an item starts off near the top of the pile, it's only going to be ranked higher over time, as the ranking of search results then affects the very things (sale numbers, etc) that dictate future search results....

[sunshine Juneberry]

Hi everyone, sorry i havent been able to get back to the thread i started

I've found the solution as to why my items fail to show in searches.

 I made the listings a while ago and they were all listed in a category that doesnt exist anymore.

When i had made the listing there was no option for uniforms, only for themed outfits. The funny thing is, is the the uniforms still were shown in edit to be listed in themed outfits, which doesn't even exist as a category anymore lol

I've changed the categories on the "lost" items and they now appear in search and are once again selling

Also, I think we should be allowed to list our items in more than one category. It would help us as well as LL make a little more L$...maybe i should start a new thread on that?

[Fabien DeSantis]

I think search is terminally broken . You can't find anything now . Try searching castles and all you get is sex beds.. I'm sure the marketplace is hemorrhaging customers who just can't find anything .. Even by specific name today..

[Ann Otoole]

Restrict your search to G rating and search for castle.

[Anaiya Arnold]

I agree that it's borked.

I once searched to see where my product appeared for a query and came back with a result of maybe three items, and none were mine so  I immediately clicked refresh to redo the search and got an entirely different set of results (including my item).  There were around 4-6 items.  Because I found this odd I decided to click refresh again to see what I got and I got a result that combined the first two results. 

I performed the searches in under a minute, so that's three different search results returned in under a minute for the exact same query. 

 

Also most days the same item that I've never sold a single copy of keeps turning up on the front page of my best selling filtered results (internally to my store). 

 

Both of these examples cannot be explained by creative filtering methods intended to circumvent gaming or ensure more merchants get exposure of their items, or anything other than borkage. 

 

Search is borked plain and simple.