Search Algorithm Update

Huge drop here as well… and before the search engine change i was heading to a personal record breaking month.

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A big drop here too,

I was selling about 30 items a week, now 0 on 4 days !!

There is something wrong with the new search algorithm change, it effect good on Audiojungle but not good at all on themeforest or codecanyon.

dont know ! low sales before , low sales now ! :smiley:

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oh look ! i complained and sold one music pack ! :smiley:

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It wasn’t my intention to run discussion about sales, but at the end i see that we all face the same problem.

@michellerobinson Are we ready to gather Beta testers again for the new Mission Faceted Search V2 :smiling_imp:

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My latest track sold in 15 minutes after it was accepted. I was very happy. But when I look search results (Corporate), It is at the end of 5th page!!!. So I can say that It will be never sold again… I know, new search algorithm is in the trial period. But it is really awful. It is almost impossible to sell new items with current situation…

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Hey there,

Today we experienced a very strange behavior for Theme Forest search, before the new updates to the search algorithm, we had in the search results new items with latest trends and features since this is the way it should be in a field where technology is always changing. Now when you make a search you find outdated items at the first results, this simply doesn’t make any sense, when a buyer searches for some item, he/she need something updated, new and with fresh design. What’s the purpose of the new update? Is it to favor top authors with old items?

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Yes, really strange - I have fresh designed and professionally built, last 2 weeks top selling resume/cv template - 2 weeks template is included in popular html list, in average it was selling 4-5 times per day, since search update is done I had only 1 purchase… But now in search on the first place is some very old template, which isn’t selling anyway… I understand this is temporary state and something will be fixed soon, but why not testing and fixing before doing such sales sensetive updates … we’re losing buyers - I think it isn’t very professional.

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I brought it up in the official thread and they’re fixing it, they’ve really gotta tighten up their QA/QC process.

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I really hope Envato gets rid of the way the search engine works currently. Titles should absolutely not be part of the search process at all. I mean when I start writing a new track I have some kind of setting in the head. A purpose. REAL inspiration. With “Happy Epic Teasertrailer” in mind I think about money, not creativity. Envato is proud to have a creative community. Therefore, favoring uncreative track titles seems to be quite contrary to their business politics. What we need is a search engine that is based on tags, not titles.

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Hi @surjithctly Themeforest is not impacted

Hi everyone,
To address a couple of things that have come up:

Which sites see this change:
This change is only switched on for a select set of keywords for AudioJungle only. It was switched on temporarily on other the but we have rolled that back, for now.

New items not showing up:
The new items not appearing issue had nothing to do with this change, it was a separate issue which has now been resolved.

Drop in sales:
Please don’t use this thread to complain about drop in sales, this is off topic. Sales fluctuate, and this time of year is generally quieter anyway.

Changes to the algorithm suggestions:
It has been suggested that we don’t weight title at all for AudioJungle. While I agree it shouldn’t be weighted highly, there are several reasons why it is not possible to give no weighting at all, one reason being when someone searches for a track by it’s track name - we want them to be able to find it. It was also suggested that giving a higher weighting to tags and description is better - this would bring other problems for relevancy. Descriptions are filled with a lot irrelevant information, like related items, author details and so forth. Tags are often irrelevant or loosely relevant - more work is needed here to make these better quality.

There are a number of options we are looking into to make the search even more relevant to the buyer, balanced and fair to authors. As I mentioned in the earlier post, we will closely monitor this change and work on future improvements.

Thanks everyone, happy holidays!

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Hi Michele, Regarding your statement above. AJ will not progress and move forward at all until you take title out of search entirely. Even you state " I agree it shouldn’t be weighted highly". Michele, because of search ranking title the highest (and I stupidly did not even discover this until about 8 months ago) You are giving us no choice but to continue to to title our tracks inspire, inspiration, fun, positive, indie, rock, upbeat, uplifting, motivation…then the upbeat, the inspiration, the happy, etc. EVERYONE selling in AJ knows that this is the ONLY way to sell a track.

“there are several reasons why it is not possible to give no weighting at all, one reason being when someone searches for a track by it’s track name - we want them to be able to find it.”

THIS IS EXACTLY WHY we are all advocating getting title out of search. 2 hours ago I tried to find my “inspire”, my “inspiration” and my “Inspired”, I’d like to first say that I absolutely detest naming these tracks these names, secondly, My tracks (with those titles I mentioned) COULD NOT be found because I literally looked on the first 12 pages and those 3 titles never showed up. Thousands of other inspires did show up, but if the customer was looking for mine, with my avatar, My inspire was nowhere to be found. So if this is happening to me, it’s happening to many. This is the very point we all are making. If we all continue to title our tracks with “Keywords”…then customers will always get 10,000 inspires to sift through, 10,000 upbeats to sift through, 10,000 upliftings to sift through, 10,000 indie’s to sift through and the market will be made to look like basic commodities.

I have a track coming on the market (I hope it’s not approved yet) that I really wanted to call “Beautiful Earth”, but because I am here to hopefully sell music, I named it “documentary”…Another track that will soon upload is now called “Dancing On the Moon”, but because of this ridiculous situation, I have decided, and to a certain extent I am guessing that it will sell better and be found at least, to call it “Upbeat”.

Do you see where this is headed? You guys must make keywords ( descriptive moods or adjectives that describe the vibe of the music) the top priority in search. Otherwise, what purpose do keywords serve?

Second Point, When I test searched 3 keywords words that often describe my music, I actually showed up on pages 1 to 3 of search more often. This means keywords are worth spending time on if we all know the customer needs to type in at least 3 descriptive adjectives. So another suggestion I have is forcing customers to type in AT LEAST 3 keywords, but even encourage more. Clearly customers come and type in 1 word more often than we think, and clearly it is frequently: inspire, inspirational, indie, rock, epic, fun, upbeat, uplifting, happy…etc

Make them type in more. Just state to customers: You must type in 3 descriptive adjectives before a playlist will be delivered to you. This way they will get more diversified results and probably may find exactly what they want on page 1 or 2 of the results.

So Envato’s goal should be to stop us from calling our tracks “keywords”, the only way to do that is to rank keywords highest in search. I also disagree with you when you say “tags are irrelevant” I don’t know about others, but I take that very seriously and spend a lot of time thinking about every word that describes my tracks. How can tags be “irrelevant”?
What can you do to force all of us to stop calling our tracks inspire and upbeat, etc in this market?
If you were a customer seeking a cinematic underscore composition for a documentary about wild life in Africa for example, would you rather click on “Beautiful Earth” or “Documentary” as a track title?

Shouldn’t the goal be creating a market where the titles are cool, creative, innovative, and imply what the music will sound like?

The floodgates are now reopened for more of the same…5000 more inspires will flood this market over the next 6 months if you do not make drastic changes, and no customer will be able to find the “inspire” they are looking for without sifting through 25,000 of them.

My 2 cents on the matter. I do appreciate you guys trying to make changes.

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Plausible. But there still has to be a way for authors to avoid naming titles after keywords AND be visible in the search engine. I’m not against getting rid of top sellers from the top of the list, quality should pop out. I’m against the necessity naming all the tracks the same. I remember having named a track something like “Title (Emotional Trailer)” when I started, it got soft rejected and I had to edit the title. So, apparently there is no compromise. Tags need more relevancy.

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What’s relevant is this:

Dear customer,

Type in the genre you are looking for____rock, jazz, cinematic, pop, latin, funk, corporate, electronic, edm, disco, film score, world, etc, etc list them all for the customer
Type in the tempo: Fast, Medium, Slow
Type in 5 words that describe the music you want, Examples are: energetic, sweet, serene, triumphant,aggressive, ambient, sad, happy, inspired, uplifting, fun, exotic, beautiful, tension, suspense, crazy, simple, spirited, joyful, festive, etc etc

This is the ONLY way it will work properly.

I am new on Audiojungle and may be some of you can think that I am too naive, but I think the issue with tags does not help with sales!

In general search by tags works! Try to type in search words “inspire epic modern.” And on the first page you will see the music with such titles as “Desert Ride”, “We are Heroes” and so on.

The issue is not in search engine but in the words that are written by the buyer.
I don’t think that envato should reeducate the buyers. The issue can be solved only if all authors stop the naming their items «Inspiration, Motivation etc» and rename all the old Items, but this is utopia I think.

If buyer wants to find something Epic, modern and inspire, and writes it in the search - may be he buys something like “We are heroes” or “Super Mega Pirate Action”.

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Not true. ThemeForest search is still drastically different to what it was just 2-3 days back, or compared to how it used to be the whole month of December and most months of 2015. If there has been an intended algorithm change, it’s not hard to admit it instead of spreading confusion all around.

New search algorithm is dead as for me :unamused:

Is it possible to add a check box “search title”, so if a buyer wants to find specific track, he should check the box and search only by title? Tags are the most important here, I think.
Here is the example of search field (not all the fields are relevant for Audiojungle), so maybe something similar as an idea:

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My exact thaughts too. By default names should be left out of search. But the buyer should have an option to search by name if they want to find an awseome version of “Jingle Bells”. Some kind of checkbox is the obvious solution here.

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