I’m pretty sure that there are much more tech savvy people than I out there ! My main “wants” are horses but I’m happy with dogs, cats, poultry and little critters. Rather than spending too much time (which I am already doing) with variations on filters (horses only, horses+ dogs, horses + cats, horses + dogs + cats…you see where I’m going), is there a more streamlined way to search ? I’m leaving all other filters open as dates, locations, etc are open. Thanks.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question, but you can select multiple pets at once / as many pet categories as you want in a single search. The system won’t take that to mean you want a sit with every type of pet listed, and should return results which have as few as one of the pet categories specified. I think that’s what you are looking for? Or do you mean that the sit must have horses, but any other pets are acceptable in addition?
Hi @toreishi
Unfortunately the THS search functionality is really poor.
From what I understand, you want to sit horses, but are happy for there to also be other types of pets included in the sit.
When you search for sits with horses, the search returns sits with only horses and no other pets. I just tested it and it told me there were no sits with horses in the whole of the UK. I then scrolled through UK listings without filtering on any type of pet, and quickly found one with horses and dogs, I’m sure there are plenty more.
I then filtered by horses and dogs. That search is returning results for horses OR dogs, so shows only dogs, as well as listings with both, so it isn’t even consistent! Horses cats and dogs is again returning just cats, just dogs, cats and dogs, dogs and horses. All of these are not returning the listing if it also has an animal you didn’t select, for example poultry.
It your options are to search all possible combinations of horses and other pets, or to not filter by pet at all and scroll through the listings looking for the horse symbol - which is often towards the end of the pet icons and doesn’t show on the front screen. Or to try every possible combination as you have been doing and scroll past those without horses. All options are needlessly time consuming.
I’m not sure what THS uses to generate search results, but a simple query with the option to use AND, OR and NOT functionality isn’t technically difficult and would make the search so much more useful for those sitters who have strong preferences for a particular type of pet. For example cats OR small furries NOT birds. (Capitals as they would appear in the code of the query, not shouting!)
And wouldn’t it be much more useful if searching for just one type of animal returned all sits including that animal, regardless of whether there were other types of pets too? After all, most sits with horses are likely to have other animals too.
I now know why I don’t use any pet filters!
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Plus the default is to search for “all pets” which excludes sits with “no pets” .
So if I am searching for a specific location and don’t mind which pets or no pets at all - I have to have create two saved searches one “all Pets” and one “no pets “ . I then receive a notification that something has been listed that meets the criteria-
Great ! However when I check most of the sits are more than an hour away from the location I searched for and with the “saved search” results I can’t sort them by distance. Also there is no indication of which of the 600+listings that are showing in the results is actually a new one 
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