Why is DAZ search so singularly awful?

lou_harper

There are at least half a dozen products in the store with "everyday" in the name. Mostly G8 but even G9. Yet when I search for them I get this:

paulawp (marahzen)

It's a known (and annoying) issue. If your search term gets an exact match, it doesn't return anything else.

xyer0

And often, an exact match will be missed in favour of several seemingly unrelated options.

Blando Calrissian

I'll usually try typing in something like "everyday " (space included), which picks up "everyday" and "every day" products (and, admittedly, a lot of other junk as well)

NylonGirl

If they have one algorithm that returns exact matches and another algorithm that returns inexact matches then why can't they just put the results from the second algorithm below the results from the first algorithm? Why do they only show one or the other?

felis

They could sort in order of match.

Today when you search you get a total mix.

nonesuch00

Exactly why I won't dump my humongous and unweildy wishlist. I'd never find that material again if I had to rely on the store search.

SilverGirl

nonesuch00 said:

Exactly why I won't dump my humongous and unweildy wishlist. I'd never find that material again if I had to rely on the store search.

^^^ This. It's not so much a wishlist as a repository for things I might someday in the far future need and don't want to spend three hours trying to locate.

frank0314

You can also do the tried and true google search tagging site:www.daz3d.com/shop in the search. There are other ways to search using google as well.

SilverGirl

I find that often the Daz search engine is like internet searches back in the day... if you confuse it, it gives you random skimpsear.

richardandtracy

I'm a pretty novice programmer, and doing a search with various match co-efficients is within my capability (done it for a spell checker, and it's directly applicable for searches), so I find it impossible to believe that programmers as good as those who come up with DS can't come up with a better one. Getting the budget and time to do so is an entirely different matter.

Regards

Richard

Richard Haseltine

richardandtracy said:

I'm a pretty novice programmer, and doing a search with various match co-efficients is within my capability (done it for a spell checker, and it's directly applicable for searches), so I find it impossible to believe that programmers as good as those who come up with DS can't come up with a better one. Getting the budget and time to do so is an entirely different matter.

Regards

Richard

Entirely different people - I'm sure they could overlap a bit if they wanted, but the skillsets are not the same so they would need to work at it.

Cybersox

For all the fancy graphics and daily sales, it's a very primitive store catalog where a large portion of the product has only the most rudimentary data.... note that most of the recent products brought over from Renderosity, for example, or how most of the older 3Delight textured products aren't indicated as such.    As for why they haven't fixed it after all these years... 1. DAZ doesn't really seem all that interested in investing the time and manpower required to go back and revise and update the older data in the store, period... note that the Users manual only mentions the old 3Delight render engine and presents Genesis 2 as the default figure.  2.  Just a guess, but from a purely retail marketing point of view, the more time one spends shopping in a store, the more likely one is to find something else that one wants to purchase in addition to what you originally came for.  In other words, the same reason that Amazon's search engine is so bad in the media sections.      

Torquinox

Before the last big store "upgrade," the site had a better search system. It would recognize terms, give related terms, and make it far easier to find the desired items. That's all gone now, of course. In the current store, each item in a page of listings has a bar that's supposed to be loaded with these little icons  that are supposed to give at-a-glance insight into what an item is. Recently, it seems no one is filling in the blanks beyond noting generation (eg g8, g81, g9) on some items. A lot of the icon bars are now completely blank. Guess that was too much trouble or something.

PerttiA

Torquinox said:

Before the last big store "upgrade," the site had a better search system. It would recognize terms, give related terms, and make it far easier to find the desired items. That's all gone now, of course. In the current store, each item in a page of listings has a bar that's supposed to be loaded with these little icons  that are supposed to give at-a-glance insight into what an item is. Recently, it seems no one is filling in the blanks beyond noting generation (eg g8, g81, g9) on some items. A lot of the icon bars are now completely blank. Guess that was too much trouble or something.

The categorisation is now way better than it was. For example, previously a lot of clothes were tagged people and if a promo picture had an animal in it, the product was tagged animal even when it wasn't.

NylonGirl

I don't know if they call them functions or methods or whatever now. But I mean if you have a function called exactMatch() that only returns an exact match, and another function called partialMatch() that only returns partial matches then how hard is it to make a third function that calls the other two?

allMatches()
{
     exactMatch();
     partialMatches();
}

Seriously, how hard is it?

Richard Haseltine

NylonGirl said:

I don't know if they call them functions or methods or whatever now. But I mean if you have a function called exactMatch() that only returns an exact match, and another function called partialMatch() that only returns partial matches then how hard is it to make a third function that calls the other two?

allMatches()
{
     exactMatch();
     partialMatches();
}

Seriously, how hard is it?

What makes you think there are such functions?

NylonGirl

Richard Haseltine said:

NylonGirl said:

I don't know if they call them functions or methods or whatever now. But I mean if you have a function called exactMatch() that only returns an exact match, and another function called partialMatch() that only returns partial matches then how hard is it to make a third function that calls the other two?

allMatches()
{
     exactMatch();
     partialMatches();
}

Seriously, how hard is it?

What makes you think there are such functions?

I think that because one or more people have said, a search query with an exact match returns one result while a search query with no exact match returns multiple results. It seems to me like there are two separate mechanisms, one of which is invoked if the first one returns no result. 

Deecey

The store results seem somewhat broken today. It's like the filters aren't working at all.  I checked "Genesis 9" and "DAZ Originals" as artist and was getting results even back to Victoria 4.

Ouch. 8-)

xyer0

You're right, @Cybersox, that explains it. Fortunately, like you, I've already bought all the existing stuff I need, but I sometimes use the store search to audition assets, and I miss the pre-scamdemic search engine.