Search is a critical component of any marketplace, determining how one side of your users finds what they are looking for from the other.

You can define the type of search to support depending on your users' needs. You can also add filtering options to your marketplace, including general filter options and specific field filters.

Search type covers how users can initiate their search in your search bar. Sharetribe has two different search types or search functions: keyword and location search.

Keyword search prompts users to start their search by typing in a keyword or phrase into the search bar. Location, meanwhile, allows users to search by typing a location such as a street, city, or country into the search bar.

You can read more about these features and how they work in these articles:

Keyword and location search can be enabled simultaneously. Location search needs to be your configured search type and keyword search enabled as a filter. How this works is that users are able to search by location from your search bar. They can then filter the results using a keyword filter.

Available when Location search is configured as the search type. When enabled, a keyword filter is shown on the search page, allowing users to filter the available results by keywords or phrases. Listing titles and descriptions are used for keyword searches by default, but you can also include Free text custom fields in the search.

Learn more about keyword search.

When enabled, a filter based on categories appears on the homepage. Only listings belonging to the selected category are returned. Since categories are nested, filtering by a top-level category will include all listings belonging to that top-level category and any subcategory or subcategory of the subcategory. On the other hand, filtering by a subcategory of a subcategory only returns listings assigned to it.

Learn more about categories.

Enabling this feature by clicking the checkbox will display a date range filter in the search page. This filter allows users to filter by their preferred booking dates. Only listings with availability during the filtered period are shown. The following settings determine exactly how date range filtering will behaves.

You can choose Partial availability or Full availability

You can choose Daily availability or Nightly availability

If you enable the date range filter, you can also enable the Seats filter, which allows users to refine their search results based on the number of available seats. Seats represent the maximum number of bookings or participants allowed for a single time slot in a listing, enabling providers to set capacity and customers to book multiple spots if available.

The price filter option allows you to add a filter to the search page. You can define the minimum and maximum range for the filter. Users can then filter listings with specific price ranges, thus excluding listings that are too cheap or too expensive.

Use the minimum and maximum values to define ranges relevant to your marketplace. Otherwise, when users use the filter, they might inadvertently filter out good listings because of the wrong filter configuration. Price filters do not define listing price limits.

You can create filters out of custom listing fields. These filters are created when building your custom listing fields.

Learn more about creating custom listing fields and filters.