GCU Forum - Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine

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Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Nov 20^th, 2011, 6:09am

Many of my photo cards are images of the Lake District, a National Park in the UK. "Lake District" appears in the title, as a phrase in the keywords, and in the description of pretty much all the cards.

While I would fully expect that, as the cards are pretty new, searching for "Lake District" would find my cards placed behind any other Lake District cards in the search results.
However, they are also appearing behind cards that have nothing to do with the Lake District.
It's not that these cards have been wrongly keyworded or described. They don't actually include the phrase "Lake District" anywhere. One card appears ahead of mine simply because one of it's keywords is "lake", and "District" is one of the words in its category.
This suggests that cards with even the most tenuous link to whatever is being searched for are appearing further up the results just because they are older or more popular.
Surely this is not an ideal state of affairs for either sellers or GCU.

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Karen_150884 Full Member artist Posts: 149	Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine Reply #1 - Nov 20^th, 2011, 8:02am Hi Dave, I have the same problem with my cards. Try typing in 'VICTORIAN' and you get all sorts of stuff that can't be descibed as 'victorian' in any shape or form! Absolutely no idea how they stream cards, would actually like to know now who decides this? Karen.
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SunAtNight_145914

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #2 - Nov 20^th, 2011, 1:38pm

You may be on to something here . . .
To test the sorting results in a different way, I clicked on a category that I knew was newly created and getting new cards. Skipping or bypassing the search engine.

Business > Christmas Cards > Industry Specific > Milk Hauling

I changed the sort from most popular to newest and they were the same. The newest was always the first listed. Since the keywords are hidden I can't test any further including testing with the search engine.

As a quickie test I placed in quotes "Lake District" in the search engine. It appears to have stripped out the quotes so much for exact phrasing. I tried boolean - Lake AND District NOT Horse and received the typical "Sorry! No greeting cards are found". So I guess it only does the boolean AND.

Never really tried the boolean with the GCU search engine before.

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Dave_183133

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #3 - Nov 20^th, 2011, 2:30pm

You can actually see the keywords if you view the source of the page, as they appear in the meta tags.

I think you are on the money with your explanation.
Similarly, a search for "landscape photos" (with or without quotes), brings up just a single page of results, none of which are mine, despite the fact that "landscape photos" is a tag for most of my cards!

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SunAtNight_145914

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #4 - Nov 20^th, 2011, 2:53pm

Quote from Dave_183133 on Nov 20^th, 2011, 2:30pm:

You can actually see the keywords if you view the source of the page, as they appear in the meta tags.

I think you are on the money with your explanation.
Similarly, a search for "landscape photos" (with or without quotes), brings up just a single page of results, none of which are mine, despite the fact that "landscape photos" is a tag for most of my cards!

I should have thought of looking at the source! I was wrapped in up in checking some of own keywords. Grin

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Mindy

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #5 - Nov 21^st, 2011, 4:12pm

Please see here about the Most Popular Formulat and its impact on the order in which cards are displayed:
http://www.greetingcarduniverse.com/forum/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1197930794

We realize there are still shortcomings in our page display logic as well as in our onsite search. There is much search engine intelligence found/used in the big search engines that we've yet to incorporate into our onsite search logic and the ideal search tool remains on our wishlist. Always a constant work in progess.

We did added a recency element to the Most Popular Formula so the top runners can be dethroned so to speak and make room for new "royalty".

A few related things to note:
1. it can take up to 24 hours for changes in data to be reflected in onsite search results
2. since photo cards are very popular and big sellers and we're forcing much "photo" traffic to "photo cards" we suggest you additionally use in your terms to describe a design of photographic nature as "photography" and / or "photograph".
3. Of the 224 cards resutling in an onsite search for "lake district" only 3 are not relevant to the "lake district" proper phrase
4. Category name is taken into consideration for onsite search results
5. our onsite search does not use Boolean operators

Let me know if you have other questions.

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Lj_135293

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #6 - Nov 21^st, 2011, 4:22pm

I watched a interview with Google development head honcho people and they said the reason they think they have done so phenomenally well is due to the fact they did not try to be all things in every which way with but few completely focused on but instead chose to focus on making just that simple box we type in the #1 focus of all build out becoming the #1 used search engine in the world today.. and the rest speaks for itself.. Sharing since it is on topic and I saw this recently. Was very good info.. I think~

.

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SunAtNight_145914 Gold Member artist Posts: 719	Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine Reply #7 - Nov 21^st, 2011, 5:05pm Thanks for the explanation Mindy! That actually explains a lot!
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Dave_183133

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #8 - Nov 28^th, 2011, 1:22am

Quote from Mindy on Nov 21^st, 2011, 4:12pm:

A few related things to note:
1. it can take up to 24 hours for changes in data to be reflected in onsite search results
2. since photo cards are very popular and big sellers and we're forcing much "photo" traffic to "photo cards" we suggest you additionally use in your terms to describe a design of photographic nature as "photography" and / or "photograph".
3. Of the 224 cards resutling in an onsite search for "lake district" only 3 are not relevant to the "lake district" proper phrase
4. Category name is taken into consideration for onsite search results
5. our onsite search does not use Boolean operators

Let me know if you have other questions.

The fact that only 3 non relevant cards appear in the results is no testament to the effectiveness of the search engine. The 3 totally irrelevant cards all appear above all of my cards. If there were 100 cards in the DISTRICT of Columbia featuring a LAKE, they would doubtless all come above my cards too.
Using the magic formula to sort relevant cards is one thing, using it to put irrelevant cards above relevant ones is quite another.

I held off replying after doing a comprehensive review of my keywords to see if it made any difference. (It hasn't so far. It's as if it's not taking any notice of the updated keywords).
There are other strange quirks with the search engine, for instance how it deals with plurals. E.G. search for "dog photo" or "dog photos" and you get the same number of results.
However, search for "waterfall photo" and you get 86 cards, search for "waterfall photos", you get none.

As I have said right from the start, I expect that any sales I get here will either come from my own promotion or via Google. (Which is already placing my cards quite nicely).

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SunAtNight_145914 Gold Member artist Posts: 719	Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine Reply #9 - Nov 28^th, 2011, 7:34pm I can honestly say that all of my sales comes directly from GCU customers. I rarely do any promotions and I don't buy my own cards that much. This quarter my sales outside of GCU were BigDates and 1 from Groupon. All the rest were GCU.
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Dave_183133

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Re: Not too impressed with the GCU Search Engine
Reply #10 - Nov 29^th, 2011, 1:59am

Quote from SunAtNight_145914 on Nov 28^th, 2011, 7:34pm:

I can honestly say that all of my sales comes directly from GCU customers. I rarely do any promotions and I don't buy my own cards that much. This quarter my sales outside of GCU were BigDates and 1 from Groupon. All the rest were GCU.

That approach wouldn't work for me unfortunately. Let's face it, my target market currently is a small subset of the UK population, plus a few expats. Since very few in the UK have probably even heard of GCU, I have to rely on Google and promote as much as I can.
I had never heard of GCU myself until about a month ago, despite the fact that I am always looking for potential new outlets.
Granted, I could probably "re-purpose" some of my cards to give them wider appeal, and I may do that at some time in the future.

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