A few weeks ago we had a “handmade code” hack day at Etsy, wherein many interesting features were born, large and small. One of the small hacks I crossed off on my to-do list that day because it didn’t exist yet was this Etsy search add-on for Firefox, for searching Etsy from within your web browser. Using the OpenSearch format, these things are wonderfully easy to bring to life. Here’s how.
The add-on was approved by Mozilla for public status and distribution today, just in time for a significant improvement to Etsy search: the ability to filter search results by category. Within a few hours of this update, I had hit a personal record in Etsy spending and paused to think about the larger economic implications to come when we really start unleashing discovery.