Printables search  

Printables has become a post and forget site.  The search function is woefully incomplete, for example you can search for competition entries but you cannot choose to exclude competition entries (even the winners are hastily designed and untested).  There are no quality metrics other than the number of downloads so prints that were popular five years ago are stuck at the top of the lists while more recent, better ones can never rise.  Until the winter of 2021 it was a relatively high quality site with perhaps one tenth of the files being of good quality but then Prusa gamified it with Prusameters and the proportion of worthless prints skyrocketed. 

Unfortunately it's far too late to repair Printables as too little identifying data has been collected from posters for any meaningful discrimination.

The best way to find files on Printables is to do a site specific search with Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or your search engine of choice.

It may still be worthwhile posting files on Printables, use it as a repository but dont expect anyone to find the files unless you link to them from some other popular site or social media.

Cheerio,

RE: Printables search

Posted by: @diem

Printables has become a post and forget site.  The search function is woefully incomplete, for example you can search for competition entries but you cannot choose to exclude competition entries (even the winners are hastily designed and untested).  There are no quality metrics other than the number of downloads so prints that were popular five years ago are stuck at the top of the lists while more recent, better ones can never rise.  Until the winter of 2021 it was a relatively high quality site with perhaps one tenth of the files being of good quality but then Prusa gamified it with Prusameters and the proportion of worthless prints skyrocketed. 

Unfortunately it's far too late to repair Printables as too little identifying data has been collected from posters for any meaningful discrimination.

The best way to find files on Printables is to do a site specific search with Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or your search engine of choice.

It may still be worthwhile posting files on Printables, use it as a repository but dont expect anyone to find the files unless you link to them from some other popular site or social media.

Cheerio,

 

For me, it's a goto site I visit first when I search for models and only portal where I publish my models.

Probably mainly because I'm prusa fanboy (idea of inhouse neighbor-country open source quality printers and filaments appeal to me).

And as per searching for quality models, you're right it's been 'gamified', but when I search I always check related items, makes and remixes.

Smarter people, if they design better version of something, link it as a remix to popular model to get the exposure.

Maybe printables isn't perfect, but I'd like to make it better if I can help it (as with anything I come in contact with).

Sometimes I have an effect and sometimes not, but that shows me where I can stop investing my energy and place it where it will do some improvement.

RE:

Printables suffers from the pains of any large dataset - when it reaches certain number of items it becomes impossible to browse without strictly applied rules to the newly added items, and thus it becomes thousands of results per search and the number of entries to review it is just overwhelming, so people search for most popular and pick the one from the top.

I usually find some models that looks like they would fulfill my needs and then search for the related tags of the given models or remixes - and usually it helps in finding the correct models. Sometimes I have to search for related models of the given electronics if I know the dimensions match.

Another option is to ask other people for tested prints if they had similar issue. But that usually means talking in other platforms like reddit or discord.