Is Ebay Search Messed Up ?

[V8RX7]

My Ebay searches keep getting random results - is it just me ?

IE just searched

Up to £10k

Holden

In Cars

I get 3 results - 1 Holden, 1 Carlton, 1 Fiat

Edited by V8RX7 on Saturday 27th August 16:14

[curlyks2]

Yes, it does appear a bit temperamental at the moment. Last night I was searching for pulsar masterpiece 108 and rather than returning one or two items which matched all parts of the search, it returned all items (millions according to its own count - I didn't scroll through and check) which matched any one or more part(s) of the search.

[trickywoo]

Rumour has it that the same person who used to be in charge of the ph search is now at eBay. They have an extensive blackmail file which keeps them in employment.

[SAB888]

Over the last two or three years Ebay search has been very poor. I sometimes find it very difficult to find what I want because the category doesn't exist any more and it's hard to find an alternative. It used to be much better.

[wack]

That's because they started shafting all the business sellers by manipulating the search engine to exclude them if they don't offer free postage within 93 seconds of getting the order with a free blowjob if the customer isn't happy.

[AlexC1981]

It's been this bad for at least a year. A search for "Orient" under wristwatches brings up crap listings such as:
"Cool Men's Watches Steel Sport Quartz Dial Faux Leather Wristwatch Big Case Hot"

I used to enjoy looking for bargain watches on ebay, but now I can't be bothered. Why does ebay think I want to wade through thousands of irrelevant results? I have checked that it is not set to Title and Description and I selected Exact Words Only, but it does not seem to make any difference.

Amazon is just as bad. Are there any decent third party search tools for ebay?

[ciege]

I love ebay, however it's become the lazy, stupid persons default shop.

Yesterday I bought a new motor for my sons lego train, brand new of Lego using pay pay £11.00 and £3 postage.

22 sold on an ebay seller in the UK, £18

Also ebays insistance on letting all the off shore chinese dealers sell and claim to be in the UK has ruined it for me.

Ebay is useful for geniuine bargains from the lady 10 miles away, otherwise I pass now!

[PurpleMoonlight]

Anyone noticed the extra worthless page you now have to navigate through to get to where you want to be?

Say, you go cars then aston martin, you used to get all the listings, now you get a page with a dozen or so large ads with a link to 'view all results' at the bottom.

Why do programmers just make life more difficult for the end user? HMRC is the worst at this, every upgrade just seems to create more clicking to get to where you want to be.

[Getragdogleg]

I swear I get a different Ebay to anyone else. I do searches for specific items and the results are poor, loads of repeat listing for items with only a tenuous link to my search yet when I go to work my colleagues will say "did you see xyz car on ebay last night ?"

Its nuts, I never see the items I would probably buy because they just don't show up. I have fiddled with settings and tried to sort it out but its ebay and its not as good as it used to be.

[e600]

Yesterday I was searching for Jaguar E Type, in the parts section and the search returned thousands of hits for tyres of different sizes covering hundreds of different car makes and models.

Appears normal at the moment, maybe they have fixed whatever the issue was

[Fore Left]

Yes. Very.

Deleting eBay cookie and clearing cache seems to have fixed it though.

[ciege]

Fore Left said:

Yes. Very.

Deleting eBay cookie and clearing cache seems to have fixed it though.

That's why all the porn keeps showing up honest...good tip!

[AlexC1981]

I just went on the customer service chat. She tried to make my searches more effective by adding more description in the search, but it still brought up the irrelevant results. She said there are no third party search tools.

It pretty much came down to this statement:

"I would like to share with you that when one brand has limited product for your searched option then it also displays the most likely items of other companies also"

She said she would pass my feedback on. If enough people can complain, maybe we will get the old search back.

[768]

I think they use Solr, probably with sharding and replication. Deleting your cookies possibly lets you access different copies of the index, some of which are bound to be different because it's a bit rubbish - albeit more or less as good as it gets, search at scale is a bit of a pain.