I wrote part 1 of this yesterday, but then the members of my public Facebook group started doing their own searches for “ftumchuk” and came up with some really interesting results. This just gives us a little more insight into how the search engine is trying to figure this weird word out!
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XWalk is the “large-scale, real-time graph retrieval engine” that Etsy is currently using for search results. It’s clearly trying to make connections between listings, and is only going to get better at it as time goes on.
Since the search term “ftumchuk” was one that I had put in an Etsy listing to test out how the previous version of search worked, it was easy to use that as an example of how XWalk is trying to make connections when you search for it.
In the previous article, I showed how Etsy was connecting the listing with ftumchuk in it to other listings, using similar terms from my shop and other shops, plus similar parts of words and probably some photo recognition.
They’re also clearly using my search history on Etsy, because they were including a bunch of edible butterflies in the search results.
The people in my Facebook group saw different results, but it was interesting because they did see some of the same ones too.
Two people in the UK and one person from Mexico saw this when they searched for “ftumchuk.” (Note that I don’t ship outside the US, so they wouldn’t be able to show any of my listings.)
Now, why did these two things come up? The one on the right is by an artist named Demchuk, and was one of the ones that came up originally when I saw that there was an extra listing showing up for that search.
I clicked on it at some point, and that’s when I realized that Etsy was adding things to that search query result.
The little felted oranges were one that came up in the “orange ftumchuk” results when I was searching yesterday, and I think that I clicked on that one, too.
So it seems that Etsy has made a connection between “ftumchuk” being searched for and me clicking on those two listings, which probably validated the connection between “ftumchuk” and the listings.
THIS IS SUPER INTERESTING!!! Well, it is for me, anyway.
Another member got this result when she searched from the app in the US:
This was basically what I was seeing, but the interesting part of this was that before she did this search she accidentally misspelled “ftumchuk” by adding a “c” and got these results:
Again, SUPER interesting, because it looks like Etsy is pulling in things that have “chuck” in the words, plus things that are related to the things that have “chuck” in them.
So the woodchuck stickers lead to other stickers, and there are nunchucks and Chuckie items in there. The one that I can’t figure out is the mailbox decals.
I was able to find them on Etsy by searching for “ftumchuck” but there aren’t any words that would make them get picked up using the “chuck” part of the word. It could be that they’re stickers, but that seems kind of random.
This is all very interesting, and will probably only get more interesting as XWalk gets more training in how to connect listings.
At this point it’s obvious that there are a lot of factors in play, and you might see some “interesting” search terms in some of your listing stats as a result. Pay attention to those, because it could explain what Etsy thinks about your listings.
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