Every time I search Etsy, I find myself really REALLY REALLY missing the long-dead Hybrowse. Here’s a Reaaaaaallly old reblog of Jake’s original Hybrowse blog post from February 2010: jakelodwick: I registered a new domain, Hybrowse.com, and hacked together a little prototype. And dammit, it worked — by putting every Etsy item’s tags (and “materials”) into a big database and letting you browse them venn diagram-style. <…snipped: a bunch of example queries with dead links…> You can combine the tags any way you like. You’re not stuck in a rigid tree of categories, like on most ecommerce sites, where you can only move backwards or forwards. With Hybrowse you can go from A to (A + B) to B. The project was only around for a few months or so before he shut it down to focus on other things, but it solved a huge problem with the Etsy shopping experience that Etsy still hasn’t been able to solve for themselves. Today I am searching for some throw pillows. Guess how many there are??? There are 21,000+ throw pillows on Etsy. There’s no way a person could ever look at all of them. Most of them are patterns or in colors or textures that I am definitely not interested in. With Hybrowse I would have searched for throw pillows, and Hybrowse would pull up the first page of results along with a list of all the tags related to throw pillows. I could very quickly click around the related tag list and generate a set of throw pillows that included everything tagged needlepoint, geometric, blue, black & white, yellow, orange, red, African Wrint, OpArt and Batik, but exclude any listings tagged floral, bird, paisley, brown, white, or pink. Sure, I can do a series of very specific searches (blue embroidered throw pillows) but I’m open to other colors and patterns, and getting specific too fast takes a lot of serendipity out of the browsing experience, so I usually end up paging through a generic search term (throw pillows) until I get exhausted of looking at the ugly-to-me ones*. This big list of related tags combined with the power of venn diagram search managed to encourage exploration AND help a person narrow down their options. This made Hybrowse an incredibly powerful search tool, which is something that Etsy** definitely needs. It’s been gone for so long I could only find a screenshot of Hybrowse for Netflix,  but I keep hoping that someday it will come back, or that Etsy will internalize the brilliance of the venn diagram-style tag-based search. Hybrowse is DomainParked with GoDaddy, but you can see a sort of similar style of image search from Getty Images Catalyst. It is not nearly as awesome as Hybrowse. *I have found a few throw pillows I like, which are on my Svpply, but it has taken 60 frickin pages to find 10 pillows that I like enough to save, and there’s 533 pages of results. **I don’t mean to pick on Etsy- I still try to shop there all the time, and all kinds of sites (including Tumblr) would be made better with this style of tag lookup.  The plan for Hybrowse was to eventually hook into hundreds of APIs, which would have been totally rad.

Every time I search Etsy, I find myself really REALLY REALLY missing the long-dead Hybrowse.

Here’s a Reaaaaaallly old reblog of Jake’s original Hybrowse blog post from February 2010:

jakelodwick:

I registered a new domain, Hybrowse.com, and hacked together a little prototype. And dammit, it worked — by putting every Etsy item’s tags (and “materials”) into a big database and letting you browse them venn diagram-style.

<…snipped: a bunch of example queries with dead links…>

You can combine the tags any way you like. You’re not stuck in a rigid tree of categories, like on most ecommerce sites, where you can only move backwards or forwards. With Hybrowse you can go from A to (A + B) to B.

The project was only around for a few months or so before he shut it down to focus on other things, but it solved a huge problem with the Etsy shopping experience that Etsy still hasn’t been able to solve for themselves.

Today I am searching for some throw pillows. Guess how many there are???

There are 21,000+ throw pillows on Etsy. There’s no way a person could ever look at all of them. Most of them are patterns or in colors or textures that I am definitely not interested in.

With Hybrowse I would have searched for throw pillows, and Hybrowse would pull up the first page of results along with a list of all the tags related to throw pillows. I could very quickly click around the related tag list and generate a set of throw pillows that included everything tagged needlepoint, geometric, blue, black & white, yellow, orange, red, African Wrint, OpArt and Batik, but exclude any listings tagged floral, bird, paisley, brown, white, or pink.

Sure, I can do a series of very specific searches (blue embroidered throw pillows) but I’m open to other colors and patterns, and getting specific too fast takes a lot of serendipity out of the browsing experience, so I usually end up paging through a generic search term (throw pillows) until I get exhausted of looking at the ugly-to-me ones*.

This big list of related tags combined with the power of venn diagram search managed to encourage exploration AND help a person narrow down their options. This made Hybrowse an incredibly powerful search tool, which is something that Etsy** definitely needs.

It’s been gone for so long I could only find a screenshot of Hybrowse for Netflix,  but I keep hoping that someday it will come back, or that Etsy will internalize the brilliance of the venn diagram-style tag-based search.

Hybrowse is DomainParked with GoDaddy, but you can see a sort of similar style of image search from Getty Images Catalyst. It is not nearly as awesome as Hybrowse.

*I have found a few throw pillows I like, which are on my Svpply, but it has taken 60 frickin pages to find 10 pillows that I like enough to save, and there’s 533 pages of results.

**I don’t mean to pick on Etsy- I still try to shop there all the time, and all kinds of sites (including Tumblr) would be made better with this style of tag lookup.  The plan for Hybrowse was to eventually hook into hundreds of APIs, which would have been totally rad.

Tags: Hybrowse browsing products search serendipity tags Etsy