There are many things that currently existing search engines are awful at searching for, but one thing in particular has recently started to bother me.. Here's

There are many things that currently existing search engines are awful at searching for, but one thing in particular has recently started to bother me.. Here's the problem: Let's say you search for "abstract art" on Etsy: [1] This results in about 1.7 million hits. Browsing through even just a few pages of results will make it clear that there's an enormous variety of art that passes for "abstract art" on Etsy. I've browsed through dozens of pages of results and concluded that most of the art is (to my taste) not very good, some small amount is decent, and a tiny percentage is pretty good. But, given the sheer enormous amount of art on there, I suspect there's probably some abstract art by artists I'd never heard of on Etsy that's I'd consider to be amazing. How do I find such art? Browsing through all 1.7 million results would take me forever (assuming I had the patience for it and Etsy even let me), so it'd be nice if there was a faster way, but I can't think of one. Obviously, searching for "amazing abstract art" would be absolutely useless, because everyone has different tastes, so even were the results not manipulated by sellers deliberately labeling their art as "amazing", just because someone thought a particular work of art was amazing doesn't mean I would. Of course, you could search for various properties of the art like its color. The odds of liking a work of art might increases if it's in your favorite color(s). So that's kind of helpful, but, honestly, if the art really is amazing it could be in just about any color and still be great. Same goes for just about any other property the art might have (like size, media, etc...). There's also the important element of surprise. Viewers aren't necessarily going to know what they like until they see it. Who before Picasso painted Guernica or before Van Gogh painted his sunflowers would have known to search for them? Often, but especially for abstract art, viewers don't know what they'll like until they see it. So even a strong AI might not help if there's nothing to ask it apart from "show me some abstract art that I'd like", the definition of which would differ for everyone. While writing this post, I did actually come up with some ideas. The first idea is recommendations by curators or friends with similar taste. The second idea is giving the search service a sample of other abstract art you liked. Using image similarity this could show you other images that had a pretty good chance of being the sort of thing you like. However, this would not be helpful in finding truly novel art that you really liked for which I still don't think there's any way to search other than by simply browsing through lots, and lots, and lots of art. [1] - https://www.etsy.com/search?q=abstract+art https://www.etsy.com/search?q=abstract+art