# Improving Search
**URL:** https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525
**Category:** New Features Ideas
**Created:** [September 8, 2026, 9:57am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525 "2026-09-08T09:57:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 17
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@thingiro](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/thingiro)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 9:57am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/1 "2026-09-08T09:57:54Z")
As a community, Thingiverse hosts a lot of content. I also clearly hear complaints about Search.
I’d like to start looking into how we can improve search and the way objects are retrieved and ranked. I feel like we can do a lot better. But I also feel like we need to understand the problem better.
My personal searches are often disappointing, but I would like to hear _real examples_ of _actual_ _members_ trying to find an object but struggling to.
Could you please recount a time you did look for an object, ways you got frustrated, how you might have refined your search, some other hack or solution you found?
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### Author:  [@thingiro](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/thingiro)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 9:58am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/2 "2026-09-08T09:58:12Z")
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### Author:  [@thingiro](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/thingiro)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 10:04am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/3 "2026-09-08T10:04:02Z")
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### Author:  [@ekuruvilla](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/ekuruvilla)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 12:29pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/4 "2026-09-08T12:29:47Z")
Personally I feel like search gets a bit too much hate.
However I do occasionally get a bit annoyed because it pulls up things that are less relevant but more popular. The search paremeters obviously sort it so that popular things show up first, but what that means is that there is often times when something that the search engine thinks is relevant, but has no bearing on the search gets brought up because it is popular.
This is even worse if you sort by popular. If you sort by most popular almost everything that comes up will be irrelevant (Which is why I tend to just not use that particular feature). I think this also gets even worse the longer your search is.
If I search “Lord of the rings” and sort by popularity the first relevant model is on page 3. If I search “book” (again by popularity) the fourth model is relevant. This is probably because a “sort by most popular” feature is hard to do well, it would probably be easy for it to be too broad and pulling in lots of irrelevant stuff, which is what is going on right now.
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### Author:  [@shrap3dworks](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/shrap3dworks)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 1:07pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/5 "2026-09-08T13:07:11Z")
I am a bit of a nerd. And the only real issue I have is that if I do a search for a nerd topic I do get things that are completely irrelevant. For example I look for a video game character and i get a a panel mount threaded connector port… Nothing in the search or model tags are anywhere close to related…
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### Author:  [@thingiro](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/thingiro)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 1:21pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/6 "2026-09-08T13:21:48Z")
Do you have a specific video game character search term that you used? And how you maybe (eventually) found relevant content?
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### Author:  [@thingiro](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/thingiro)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 1:22pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/7 "2026-09-08T13:22:07Z")
Thanks, will look into these two terms
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### Author:  [@shrap3dworks](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/shrap3dworks)
#### Post date: [September 8, 2026, 1:36pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/8 "2026-09-08T13:36:47Z")
In my case, most of the search was fine. It was just a few sprinkled in there that didn’t make sense…
I think the search criteria are doing something unexpected to link something related to what I am looking for with things that have no connection at all. Be it by searches from the users or random text in the part descriptions. I don’t know what it is. But I would figure the search should be limited to tags and titles. nothing else.
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### Author:  [@shrap3dworks](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/shrap3dworks)
#### Post date: [September 9, 2026, 3:04pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/9 "2026-09-09T15:04:38Z")
@thingiro here is an example.
I was looking for an adaptor for a two part epoxy mixing pipe that I could plug on a finer point end to. (essentially, I want a fine tip applicator on a 2 part epoxy gun)
my search term was “epoxy mixer to fine point”
What I got… A vase. A model gun. And a model of Johnny 5. Among other things.
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### Author:  [@artofwalls](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/artofwalls)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2026, 2:15am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/10 "2026-09-10T02:15:15Z")
I don’t know what is the criteria the algorithm follows to make searches. If I search for “star wars” will it search for “star AND wars” or for “star OR wars”? First case is obviously the most useful since I’m interested in something that has both words and not just any of the two. Also, it would be intresting to have an option to search for the words “star” and “wars” or for the exact phrase “star wars”. Finally something to limit the search to the title only.
I sometimes get the impression the algorithm searchs for ANY of the words I enter in ANY of the text of the thing, even in the users comments! Or not even that. It simply shows a thing that has not any of the words I type just because “stab” has a 20% spell coincidence with “stars”.
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### Author:  [@jonathanpiasecki](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/jonathanpiasecki)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2026, 6:04am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/11 "2026-09-10T06:04:51Z")
> [@artofwalls](#):
>
> I don’t know what is the criteria the algorithm follows to make searches.
Funny you should mention that! I’ve been playing with search to try to figure out what it might be doing. Here are some notes on what I think it does. I’ll have some suggestions at the end for improving search.
It’s not immediately obvious how search matches your search term to what it finds and returns. For example, if I search on _ho scale garage_ and select **Relevant** for the search results, these are the top 4 items returned:
The first one is a decent match: the title contains the words “HO Scale” and “Garage”, but the title does not exactly match the search string, and the exact search string does not appear in the item’s description. I cannot tell why this one returns as the top hit.
The second one is odd: the title contains the words “HO Scale” but not “Garage”, so it does not match the search string. The word “garage” appears in the item summary, so search is finding one of the search words in the text associated with the item. The item has a lot of likes, so that’s probably why it is the second hit - when searching on just _ho scale_, this is always the first item returned. But to the casual user, it’s not obvious why this item is returned at all for _ho scale garage_ and why it is the second hit in the list.
The third one should be first! Not because it’s mine 🙂 but because its title exactly matches (other than upper and lower case letters) the search string. As a user, I’d expect something with a title that matches the entire search string to be returned first.
The fourth one I do not understand: the title and Summary text only contain individual words from the search string, so I don’t see how this one is ranked so highly. Looking at the hits that come after this one, there are models that seem to be a better match for the search string and I would expect those other models to appear before this one.
In looking at the results and at the text and tags associated with each model, it looks like search may work like this:
1. **Tags come first.** If a part of the search string is the same as some tag associated with the item, search returns all items with that tag regardless of what’s in the title or Summary text. In my example, search returns items with the tag _ho scale_ first before ranking the results from the text matches.
2. **Title and Summary text come second.** After tags, search seems to prioritize the presence of words in the title or Summary text. In my example, it seems to be locating any of the words in my search string: _ho, scale,_ and _garage_. When typed as shown here – _ho scale garage_ – it seems to treat the words individually rather than as a phrase. To treat something as a phrase, enclose the text in “” quotes – more on that later. It also looks like the title text may have more weight – that is, be considered more relevant – than the Summary text.
3. **Search sorts items by likes.** Or at least it does this when sorting the search results by **Relevance**. So search results seem to be ranked by matching a tag, then matching text, then are ordered by the number of likes.
Things appear to go off the rails when you select **Popular** as the search option. In my example, the top four things are _completely unrelated_ to the intended search. Here are the top four results for _ho scale garage_ when **Popular** is selected. None of them have _ho_ as a distinct word, but they do have _scale_ or _garage_ somewhere in their Summary text. Here search is returning _anything_ that has _any_ of the words in the search string and then sorting them by likes. Sorting by popular items can be made to work, but you need to use _operators_ to make the context of your terms more clear to the search algorithm.
Search becomes far more powerful when you use the “” quotes and + plus and - minus operators. “” quotes makes the search look for the exact term. + plus tells search that the results must contain the indicated term. - minus tells search that the results must not contain the indicated term. I do not think that the Boolean operators AND, NOT, and OR work, but the “”, +, and - operators definitely work.
**Recommendations:**
**Search should operate on _all_ text associated with an item – more data is always good.** The text matching part of search looks like it operates on just the title and Summary text. It does not look like the search indexes text in the Print Settings, Post-Printing, and other text blocks. I think it would be worthwhile to index all of the text associated with an item but understand that there might be a performance trade-off there. If that’s the case, prioritize performance.
**The search user interface should make it easier to use the “”, +, and - operators.** Typing them in should always work, but some sort of user interface to let people know that these operators are available and to insert the operators with a button click would be helpful.
**Search should give more weight to the text associated with an item rather than to the tags.** The text associated with an item will provide more information than a tag. Tags are a kind of folksonomy and folksonomies are full of errors, typos, duplications, and weird entries that were meaningful to _that one guy_ but that nobody else would ever think of. For example, I created the tag _Vonda_ for one of my models. Is anyone else ever going to use it? Probably not.
Tags probably still have a place, so maybe search could assign weight to tags and text differently depending on the search term and what it finds:
- If the _entire_ search string without operators is an exact match for a tag, order the search results by tag-based matches and then by text-based matches.
- If the _entire_ search string without operators is _not_ an exact match for a tag, order the results by text-based matches and then by tag-based matches.
Just some thoughts.
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### Author:  [@shrap3dworks](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/shrap3dworks)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2026, 4:06pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/12 "2026-09-10T16:06:37Z")
Now I know what a Ho Scale is. And sadly, it’s not what I originally thought.
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### Author:  [@ksihota](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/ksihota)
#### Post date: [September 10, 2026, 4:54pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/13 "2026-09-10T16:54:37Z")
Yes, you really have to be careful when you use terms like H0. You never know when someone might take offence. As kids we had an H0 gauge set as well as the older larger gauge set (maybe a 0 scale). Nowadays, HO can mean something different depending on context. 😬
And who discusses Holmium anyways unless you are a nuclear scientist or a grade 8 science teacher.🤔
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### Author:  [@jonathanpiasecki](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/jonathanpiasecki)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2026, 3:45am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/14 "2026-09-11T03:45:23Z")
@ksihota @shrap3dworks No thoughts on my search observations? Just jokes about my ex?
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### Author:  [@ksihota](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/ksihota)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2026, 3:56am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/15 "2026-09-11T03:56:23Z")
You put so much work into your analysis, I haven’t had the time to digest it. I am in the middle of a bathroom renovation so I only take short breaks to view this stuff right now. Do you know if there are any special rules that apply to the search field such as REGEX?
I agree that a search should be checking the body, title, and tags. The user needs to be able to control the search so the ± and quotes are useful tools but this information should be provided with a quick help tool. There are so may different search tools on different sites that users need the information on how to search displayed right there. I do not think that a search should be including “likes” at all or by the number of downloads etc. if that is indeed being used.
@jonathanpiasecki do you actually live in downtown Vonda or do you have a farm close by?
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### Author:  [@shrap3dworks](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/shrap3dworks)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2026, 11:28am UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/16 "2026-09-11T11:28:20Z")
I mean… I cant fix the problem… So I accept it for what it is.
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### Author:  [@jonathanpiasecki](https://forum.thingiverse.com/u/jonathanpiasecki)
#### Post date: [September 11, 2026, 3:15pm UTC](https://forum.thingiverse.com/t/improving-search/525/17 "2026-09-11T15:15:53Z")
@ksihota Just did some testing and it does not look like the Thingiverse search supports regular expressions. I know, I know – I’m disappointed too. Heartbroken, even.
About Vonda: I live in town. One of my models gives away my location!