Discovery and search

Following is the main loop on Network — buyers follow sellers, the feed fills, life is good. But buyers have to find sellers worth following first, and sellers want to be findable. This article covers the four discovery surfaces inside Network and how each one decides who shows up where.

Explore — the trending grid

/network/explore shows you posts from across the platform, regardless of who you follow. Think of it as the "what's hot right now" page: it's the surface a brand-new buyer hits when they open Network for the first time and have followed nobody yet.

Explore is filled by an engagement-weighted ranker that considers:

• Recency — heavy decay on age. A post from this morning beats a popular post from a week ago.
• Likes and comments — the basic engagement signal.
• Author quality — verified, active, well-followed sellers get a small boost; flagged or dormant ones get demoted.
• Diversity — the page won't fill with five posts from one seller, even if they're all hot. There's a cap per author per page.

Posts from private sellers never appear on Explore — that's by design. If you want your posts to be discoverable by strangers, your seller profile has to be public. See Following and the feed for the privacy switch.

A post that earns its way onto Explore typically has at least: a clear primary photo, a useful one-or-two-line text body, and at least one engagement signal in the first hour. None of these are strict thresholds — the ranker is fuzzy on purpose — but if a post has none of them, it'll struggle to surface.

Suggested dealers — the right rail

The right column on /network (and on most Network pages) shows a card titled Suggested dealers. Each entry is a seller with a Follow button.

How suggestions are picked:

• Affinity from your viewing history — sellers whose listings you've recently viewed.
• Mutuals — sellers followed by sellers you already follow, weighted by overlap.
• Category match — if you've spent time in Excavators / 20-25t / EU, sellers active in that slice surface higher.
• Geography — same country / region gets a small boost when you're a buyer; sellers see a country-agnostic mix.

Suggestions refresh on each visit — the same card won't show you the same five sellers in a row.

You can dismiss a suggestion with the small × on the card. Dismissed sellers stop showing up in Suggested for an extended period, but they still appear normally everywhere else (search, explore, listings).

The See all dealers link at the bottom of the card opens the full dealer directory — useful when you want to browse beyond the algorithm.

Inline profile search — the left-nav input

At the top of the Network left navigation lives a search input with a magnifying-glass icon. It searches seller profiles by name and handle.

Behaviour:

• Start typing — after 2 characters and a quarter-second pause, results appear in a dropdown directly below the input.
• Each result shows the seller's avatar, display name, verified badge (if any), and @handle.
• Up/Down arrows cycle through results; Enter opens the highlighted seller's Network profile at /network/u/{handle}.
• Esc clears the input on first press, closes the dropdown on the second.
• Click outside to dismiss.

The search reaches both public and private sellers — privacy settings only gate posts, not the existence of the profile itself. So a buyer searching for MariaExcavators will find the profile even if it's private; they just won't see any posts on it until they're approved as a follower.

Want a richer search with filters (country, type, verification)? That's the marketplace-side dealer directory at /dealers, linked from Suggested → See all dealers. The Network search is meant to be quick, in-feed, and minimal.

How buyers actually find you (a seller's eye view)

If you're a seller wondering how a stranger ends up on your Network profile, here's the realistic flow ordered by typical volume:

1. A friend recommends you offline — they paste /network/u/{your-handle} in chat. Direct hits like this account for a surprising slice; make sure your handle is memorable.
2. They land on a listing of yours from search and tap your avatar to see the rest of your stock — that drops them on /seller/{handle}. From there a View Network link brings them across.
3. They find a post in /explore and tap your name in the post header.
4. They search for you by name in the Network search input.
5. You appear in their Suggested dealers rail because they've viewed listings in your category.

The first two paths exist independently of Network's quality. Paths 3, 4 and 5 reward an active, public profile with a good network bio and a recent post. The two work together: a seller who hasn't posted in three months won't surface in Suggested because the algorithm reads them as dormant.

What doesn't exist yet

A few things buyers ask for that aren't currently part of Network:

• Hashtag pages — hashtags in posts are linkified but tapping them just searches the feed. Dedicated /network/tag/... pages are on the roadmap.
• Saved searches with notifications — if you want to be alerted when sellers in a specific country post about a specific make, the right home for that is the marketplace's saved-search feature, not Network.
• Geo browsing — there's no map view for sellers/posts on Network. Use the dealer directory's country filter instead.

Next steps

• What is Network? — start here if you've landed straight in this article.
• Your Network profile — what new visitors see when discovery lands them on you.
• Following and the feed — what happens after they hit Follow.