Etsy.com whose homepage declares, “Your place to buy & sell all things handmade”, has rolled out a new search engine that returns only handmade items in results.

Now almost 3 years old, with 1.1 million listings, and 5 buyers for every seller, they’ve tweaked how both browsing and searching works. Effective 5th May, -

The main search bar will default to searching only handmade goods. This means that vintage items and commercial supplies will, by default, be excluded from search results. Of course, the searcher can opt to include them by selecting the correct option from the drop-down menu to the right of the search bar.

Right now we have what we call “subcategory bleed.” When you click into, say, Art, you only see items whose first tag is Art. But as soon as you hit a subcategory in Art, like Drawings, you see all items who have both those tags, no matter what the first tag is. This will be remedied to work in the way that most people expect it to work (from other ecommerce taxonomies): Art > Drawings will only show items with the first tag Art; in other words, items inside that top-level category.

The site yesterday announced extending the visibility of non-handmade items, such as commercially produced handicraft supplies and vintage items, by four months, to compensate for the loss of search and browse visibility. Those both have their own categories at the top level, and should still be easily findable by enthusiasts on this niche site. The 4-month extension is available to all listings extended or renewed before 30 June. All such listings must be correctly tag-categorised.

Seems it’s not just eBay playing with search & finding - eBay, now Etsy, will eBid be next in the “e+3 site names” to play with visibility? Ee-bye-gum - it’s all too much for me.

Ed