What Happened to the Promised Search & Categorization Updates?

xyer0

Last year, there were pinned threads authored by official Dazniks proclaiming upcoming/ongoing search and categorization updates. I somehow got the idea that the goal was to get the store back to pre-November 2020 standards, aka "working." I've seen very little if any confirmation that said updates have taken place, especially when the new generation is more miscategorized than any in the store's history. Any news?

PerttiA

I remember even older posts by official Dazniks in which they told, they were working on it, but nothing...

At the moment, one can't help but think, the categorization is done by AI = If there is a character in any of the promo pictures, it is tagged people or if there is an animal in any of the promo pictures it is tagged animal, even when neither of the products contained any people or animals.

If someone was working on it, one would expect to see the change in the newest releases first...

DustRider

PerttiA said:

At the moment, one can't help but think, the categorization is done by AI = If there is a character in any of the promo pictures, it is tagged people or if there is an animal in any of the promo pictures it is tagged animal, even when neither of the products contained any people or animals.

Are you referring to AI as meaning Almost Intelligence??  Sorry, I couldn't resist. I really think true modern AI would do a much better job than what we see in the categories.

In fact, I think a really good SQL guru with a bit a manual clean up could fix the categories in short order (that is assuming someone had the fore site to store everything in a modern SQL database). But that's just my opinion and I could be totally wrong.

Richard Haseltine

PerttiA said:

I remember even older posts by official Dazniks in which they told, they were working on it, but nothing...

At the moment, one can't help but think, the categorization is done by AI = If there is a character in any of the promo pictures, it is tagged people or if there is an animal in any of the promo pictures it is tagged animal, even when neither of the products contained any people or animals.

If someone was working on it, one would expect to see the change in the newest releases first...

It isn't AI.

kwerkx

IMO I get the sense that search is based on terms found in product titles and descriptions; while, categories are assigned.  

Categories (and I'm sure I've seen this suggested before) could be crowd sourced by allowing users or specific (Daz+ maybe) users tag products with the appropriate categories.  You might even get users to do this for free or offer some fraction of a discount to be earned by each accepted annotation.  IMO accurate and additional categories we could add or omit as we shop would go a long way.

Search is a different beast altogether.  If it's based on product titles and descriptions, they have to be descriptive and the search engine would ideally account for suffixes, partial terms, synonyms etc.  Messy messy messy.. lucky for Daz, every 3D asset store I've visited has a similar problem.

Richard Haseltine

kwerkx said:

IMO I get the sense that search is based on terms found in product titles and descriptions; while, categories are assigned.  

Search also looks at keywords, as far as I know.

Categories (and I'm sure I've seen this suggested before) could be crowd sourced by allowing users or specific (Daz+ maybe) users tag products with the appropriate categories.  You might even get users to do this for free or offer some fraction of a discount to be earned by each accepted annotation.  IMO accurate and additional categories we could add or omit as we shop would go a long way.

Search is a different beast altogether.  If it's based on product titles and descriptions, they have to be descriptive and the search engine would ideally account for suffixes, partial terms, synonyms etc.  Messy messy messy.. lucky for Daz, every 3D asset store I've visited has a similar problem.