Why is Makerworld Search so Terrible?

That is really odd. I pulled up the “Fidget Morf Worm” that is the top result for “mask” and it doesn’t appear to have the word mask anywhere in the title, description, keywords or anywhere on the page. Wonder what their algorithm is seeing?

Reminds me. I searched up Dummy 13 and had to scroll a bit. Was on the 11th row for me. Found that curious as I would have expected it to be at the top. To be fair, it’s just as lost on printables.

Even search hints are broken:

WHAT?!?

In swedish mask means worm but I guess that is just a coincidence

wonder if it does some kind of auto translataion since the multilingual update they did a while ago. If I search for “häst” I get a lot of horse models. (Häst is swedish for horse)

searching for “tåg” shows train models. Tåg is also sedish for train. But using Finnish words do not seem to work oddly though… Is the search engine perhaps trained by Swedes

It appears mask == worm to someone, a lot of worms in that list, none having the word “Mask” anywhere in the tags or descriptions.

Perhaps the reality of the world is that often times worms mask their emotion. We think of them as just little wiggly things burrowing about, but maybe the lot of them are having an existential crisis; silently screaming out to a universe that just does not make sense to them. The mask they wear hides their tears and pain though, and all we see, is a wiggly little worm.

someone needs to model a therapy couch for the worms.

Yeah the results for Mask are pretty off with some of those results.

With all of the new AI tools available to developers, this is the perfect time to implement Semantic-powered Search, which would allow people to type in what they are looking for in a more natural way. With MakerWorlds goal of helping people find models that makers want to print, this seems like low-hanging fruit.

Ohhhh, that’d be nice. I could be like “show me what you got!.. except hueforge.”

I want a search engine to be able to detect my rage levels via use of emojis too, so it knows just how much I don’t want it to show me hueforge.

No offence to hueforge, it’s a neat thing, but not something I personally care for in my searches. Maybe some offence intended. Depends who you are and if you follow me or not.

Sold. Ship it, pack it to the printer. Not sure why I need it, but I do.

MakerWorld constantly is tinkering with search and recommendations. It doesn’t even seem like the shorter title and fewer keywords matters as much as it did a few months ago (maybe I’m out of touch over the summer?).

Do what I did, stop using it.

Agreed, and the search functions questionable value is by no means limited to masks! Virtually every search I’ve performed excluded models meeting the search criteria (which earlier appeared in my random viewing) and returned what seems like hundreds of unrelated results. The problem will only grow with the catalog’s expansion. The issue makes the search function practically useless.

I do wish it also included common misspellings, eg if you search for desiccant and dessicant you get entirely difference search results. Should be the same tbh

Exactly, if I wanted to print something off in 2D, I would not use my 3D printer. If only there was a way to hide these across the site. lol

I have noticed the search has not produced useful results. Have never looked into why. Somethings come up that are silly, but understandable, like sub-words or mis-spellings.
Two issues.
1 how to choose what I search for, to get the results I want.
2 how to make my items searchable. So they get found.

Yeah, i’ve never been able to figure out how the “Relevant” criteria works - Searching for Pokemon Keychain never puts my models near the top, even though if you sort by download, likes, or Collects, they all show up right at the top. I tried altering my tags on a few model packs, but it didn’t seem to make any difference.