How it picks

One search per theme per morning, and a very short rule.

The choice

1. Search Etsy for the theme, in Etsy’s own relevance order — the same order a person browsing would get.
2. Throw away everything you have already been shown.
3. Of what is left, take the one with the most favourites.

That is all of it. There is no model, no scoring and nothing personalised. Favourites is a popularity count that Etsy publishes on every search result, and it is presented as one: it means other people liked this, not that you will.

Ties break on price, then on listing id, so the same morning always produces the same pick.

What “already shown” means

Everything the search returned is remembered, not just the one that was picked. You can open the same search in your own browser and see the whole page, so a listing that was on it yesterday is not a discovery today — counting only the picks would mean showing you the second-most-favourited thing tomorrow and calling it new.

What is stored is a list of listing ids. No titles, no prices, no shops. It is capped, so it cannot become a record of everything you have ever looked at.

Silence is the feature

On a morning when a search returns only things you have seen, no email is sent. Nothing happened, and saying so with silence is more useful than saying it with a message.

The single-user version of this app produced something every single day. As an email that is a habit, not news — and a digest that arrives whether or not it has anything is how people stop opening digests.

How often you hear from it

Measured on three moderately active themes over sixty days: a find on 33 mornings, and 27 silent ones. That is right for somebody who asked for a morning find and far too much for somebody who wanted a newsletter, and with a dozen themes it would be every day.

So the cadence is yours: as it comes, every few days, or once a week. Finds are collected daily and always appear on the site whatever you choose; the setting only holds the email back, and when one goes out it carries everything found since the last one.

When a theme has run out

Etsy sorts by relevance, so the top of a broad search is much the same for months. Every keyword runs out eventually.

After five days running with nothing new, a theme is called dry, and you are told once. Not every morning afterwards — a drought that repeats itself daily is just the noise this app is trying not to make. If something new does arrive later, the count resets, and a second drought later on is a second piece of news.

Narrower words nearly always work better than broader ones. “Pottery” returns the same famous shops for months; “speckled stoneware mug” turns up people you have never heard of. You can also start a theme over, which clears what it remembers — and it will show you the same things again, which is the honest answer to what that button does.

No photographs

Etsy only returns image links from a different call than the search, so showing thumbnails would double the requests made on your behalf — and it would mean every page here loading pictures from Etsy’s servers. Neither seemed worth it. Every find links straight to Etsy, which is where the photographs are and where the thing is bought.