SLM not updating relevance?

[Couldbe Yue]

It's taken a while for the penny to drop but they seem to have changed the concept of "relevant".  It used to be along the lines of a 3 day window of recent sales and then the rest displayed according to a weighting.  Now they seem to have removed sales and sale price from the weighting from some items (not all as I have had some recent sales pop up on the first few lines displayed). Only one thing I've sold in the last week has popped to the top and some of them didn't even make it to the first page (that's the 96 items displayed first page!)

I can't even begin to fathom the logic behind the current returns displayed, things are still being shuffled around but not in a way that seems to be consistent or meaningful.

Is this another memo I missed?

 

 

[Zanara Zenovka]

Something seems a bit different in my listings too, but TBH I'd be glad to see sales etc removed from relevance results, in favour of, ooh let's see... matching search terms?

[Amethyst Jetaime]

Personally I hope they removed sales numbers and price as a factor in relevancy, if they did.   Relevance to me has nothing to do with how  many were sold or the price.  If they are important to me, I can sort for those factors quite well . When I search I want the initial return to be items that match closest to my search words on top and the ones that match to a lesser degree in descending order below.

I can't tell you how many times I've entered specific search terms and gotten results that are in no way or only marginally related to my search, but that are probably recent sellers, taking a higher priority than something that is exactly what I wanted, buried several pages down.  It just wastes my time and is frustrating.

I think that eliminating price and sales levels in any search is a good thing and levels the playing field of the MP more to make it more fair to all merchants.  It gives a much better chance that  their work will be seen, something that is extremely difficult for new creators with the way the MP works now without spending a lot of money for ads.  Merchants come and go and it is in most everyone's best interest to encourage new merchants to replace the ones that leave and to bring out fresh designs and ideas. 

 

 

[Couldbe Yue]

lol you still expect rational?  To give them their due, the rest of the web also weighs relevence returns with other things but usually they start with something approaching a matching term before they start jigging around with it. 

Just recently I sat in a meeting with a (eta - *non* LL)commerce search dev and the weightings used to define "relevance" made me realise just how little relevance a search term has to the actually returns you see.  It really was disheartening.

 

[Couldbe Yue]

I'd certainly like to see some kind of weighting that would penalise sellers who haven't logged into the marketplace in a period of time (6 months is fair I think, even though I'd rather it was something shorter).  That way at least stuff would be shown where the seller is around - even if it's only to log in. 

Other weightings are an assumption of how searchers view relevance and has the potential to be a minefield (as inworld search shows - that's been damaged almost two years now.  One can only assume it's beyond repair or at least beyond LL interest).  If I search for a term I certainly don't expect it to rank on how recently it was bought, the rating or something completely different yet that's what people who create search code think we want it..  the really don't believe that we just want an exact match, then a partial match.  Apparently they know better than us what we want.  go figure.

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Couldbe Yue wrote:

I'd certainly like to see some kind of weighting that would penalise sellers who haven't logged into the marketplace in a period of time (6 months is fair I think, even though I'd rather it was something shorter).  That way at least stuff would be shown where the seller is around - even if it's only to log in.

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I like this idea. It is better for the customer to have merchants that are around to give customers support for their items then merchants who don't. So it would be a good thing, both for the customers and the merchants that active merchants gain more visibility on the marketplace.

I think it is not too much asked from a merchant to login once a month to both the marketplace and in world. If you are not prepared to do so the cost would be a sink of visibility of your items on the marketplace.