To make the search experience more natural, we also search in other things than tags now. If you know the name of your favorite designer or icon set, you can directly add that to a search query. For example, “laura reen folder” or “icojam cat” will now give meaningful results. The same goes for styles (e.g. “facebook outline”) and price (“computer free”).
When searching, you’ll now find a dropdown that controls the sorting of results. You can sort by relevance (the default setting), newest first, and four different ranges of downloads. The sorting dropdown is found in the top right corner above the search results.
When you open an icon set, you will notice a nice little "bubble" in the search bar. If you add a search query next to it, you will be able to search inside this icon set only.
The content team at Iconfinder picks out the best new icons and features them. These show up on the homepage and a few other places. Now featured icons will also receive a boost in search results. We have even added a new filter that lets you search in featured icons only (they are sooo pretty).
You can now use special characters such as -, +, @, and similar in your search queries. For example, if you search for "24/7", you will now see a lot of relevant results.
When searching for multiple words, the results are now narrowed down. So instead of both returning “hot” and “dog” icons for “hot dog”, we now only return icons that match both words. This gives fewer results but filters out a lot of noise.
The search now returns meaningful results for misspelled entries. For example, if you type in "faceboko", instead of showing no results and a message about the misspelling, we immediately redirect you to the “facebook” results.
To allow for more sensitive accessibility, users now have the option to conduct a “safe search”, which will prevent explicit icons from appearing in their results.
The explicit label is placed on icons with mature content, which may not be suitable for work-place and underage viewing. API customers will also have the option to enable this feature for all of their users.
Newly published icons that contain certain tags will now be added into a new review queue, for potential need of the explicit label.
In order to give our users access to better organized, higher quality, and more relevant icons, we launched and informed our contributors about a number of new practices that will help clean-up our content.
Our article on Content Care outlines the 5 new policies that we will begin rolling out:
• Removal Policy - Outlining when, how, and why content may be removed from our site
• Rest Mode - Hiding outdated and underperforming icons from the main search results
• Offensive Content - Stating what type of content is prohibited from our site
• Explicit Label - Marking mature content as explicit, allowing for a "safe search" option
• Logos & Trademarks - Defining our rules about logo and trademark use within icons, and removing those that infringe
In addition, the tags guidelines were drastically updated - holding contributors to a higher set of standards for properly tagging their sets.
Over time certain icons may become outdated and no longer meet present day demands or standards. In order to keep these icons from diluting the search results, some existing sets may now be set to Rest-Mode.
Rest-Mode disables a set's icons from appearing in the regular search results, but will keep them visible and available for purchase directly from a contributor's shop page. This keeps the search results full of fresh and high quality icons, without permanently removing older icons from the site.
To be considered for Rest Mode, the icon set must have been published for multiple years with a record of very low sales performance, and meet a number of low-quality/outdated criteria.