[_def]

Thangs is super useful, as you can search by geometry. Sort of like a reverse image search. Works really well and is just amazing to me.

[crowbahr]

I've never actually understood the use case for that personally. What do you reverse model search?

[demeyer1]

It‘a most often used as an auto-complete - of sorts.

For example, upload an engine piston and it will find other pistons, then all the engines that the piston will also fit within. Handy for designers and mechanical engineers.

But, in the 3D printer use case it is most often used to find similar objects (it does both). For example, upload and a Squid Games mask to print for Halloween and find other Squid Games masks. It’s entirely geometric in that use case, and math doesn’t care if you have different languages or people add the right tags and categories.

Hopefully that makes more sense.

In general, that feature is used less than 1% of the time vs text search. We have a powerful text search engine which we’ve built and customized on top of a lucene implementation. We are generally improving CTR by a percent or two every week.

[crowbahr]

That does make sense.

I've used Thangs before but hadn't really understood the use case for the reverse search. Thanks for the explanation!