I have done a few searches recently in shapeways for different products and I am curious as to how Shapeways determines what products are shown and in what order.
Is it based on most recently uploaded items? Or based on prior views (ie more popular are listed higher? Or does it have to do with the keywords? Or something else entirely.
Naturally, I (like everyone) want to see my products appear first, particularly where my products are relevant for given search terms.
The other issue I have is that I have always read about how Shapeways won't feature items if they haven't been printed and have real photos uploaded. This makes sense to me, yet in the searches above, I would say the proportion of rendered images to real images on the first few pages is probably 2/3:1.
A final one - the search terms seem to be cumulative which means the more terms you put in the more products you get, rather than refining the search. But the top items aren't necessarily those which contain the highest number of those search terms which makes it less useful still.