As a sitter with many 5 star reviews, I’ve been invited to many sits. Just recently, I was curious as to how homeowners search for a sitter and find me amongst all the sitters on here. So I went into “find a sitter” and noticed the filters of “member reviews” and “experience”. I presumed this would narrow down the field and the sitters with the most reviews and experience would show at the top and sitters with less reviews would be at the bottom. This wasn’t the case as the sitters were ranked in no order at all. Some of the sitters at the top had 1 or 2 reviews whereas there were sitters like myself with over 50 reviews at the bottom. What is the purpose of this search feature? It seems useless in assisting homeowners to find sitters with the most reviews and/or experience.
Did you set any filters though? I’m not a HO on here so I don’t know if that’s a tool HOs have at their disposal.
I’m given 3 filters to search for sitters.
Dates - My Pets - Experience
I checked the box for “Experience” and looked at the first 10 pages of results, they were all 5 star sitters but the number of reviews varied and there was no particular order, in that a sitter with 30 reviews might show up on the third page while a sitter with 1 review could be on the first page.
I’ve noticed this .
Using filter “experience” gives you all sitters who have had at least one review and in no particular order ( there is no function to sort the list of hundreds from most reviews to least )
So it just filters out the new sitters with no reviews.
The order of sitters changes regularly, which is fair
Apparently it doesn’t display sitters with less than a 5 star rating.
I agree that is fair. When I first joined THS eleven years ago, the sitters with the most reviews always appeared first.
Maybe THS should implement a handicap system whereby the least reviewed sitters are on the first sets of pages and the experienced sitters with dozens of reviews get sent back to somewhere around page 20.
I just did a search of sitters with member reviews and it shows sitters with less than five star reviews within the first few pages.
That’s what I don’t understand. If I was a homeowner searching for sitters with the most reviews, I wouldn’t expect to have to scroll through many pages to find sitters with the most reviews. That’s very time consuming.
Odd. Perhaps YASG. (Yet another system glitch).
There’s a field “years of experience” that is filled in by the sitter even if there are no reviews or references, could that be the order in which they are shown?
You just might be onto something. Then again it could be some sort of randomization to be fair as suggested by @Smiley
I think it is random now.
A few years ago the sitters with the most reviews appeared at the top but that is no longer the case.
@BonnyinBrighton this is a screen shot of the filter page an owner can use to search for a sitter
