eBay

zsrc · ‎02-07-2023

The new layout is trash (every time they change search results it's get worse and not better). Also, my saved searches that excluding certain sellers, now no longer exclude those sellers. Stop trying to "improve" the search layout. It is ALWAYS worse.

Back to the question, is there a way to revert back to how things were up until yesterday?

eburtonlab · ‎02-07-2023

Changing the layout of a page by itself has no affect on search, though it is possible that eBay has also changed the way search works.

There have been many complaints about certain kinds of searches no longer working.

If a search that has worked well previously suddenly starts behaving badly and providing no results, often the problem has something to do with a faulty keyword substitution or an inappropriate automatic category navigation issue.

You can bypass many of these sorts of issues by putting one of your keywords in quotes. This forces eBay to bypass the "smart search" features and to search for the literal keywords without any substitution or category switching. You may have to manually specify your category once again.

Can you provide an example of a search that no longer works for you and a brief description of how it is failing?

If eBay has changed the way the search parameters are used, there may be a way to modify your existing search URL to regain the desired function. If not, you may need to create a new search.

ocrarecoin · ‎04-06-2023

I agree with @zsrc . In our specialized category of Coins & Currency, the old search engine was much more effective. This new thing has totally redone algorithms that spit out garbage results.

It forces us to click a bunch of boxes on the left side of the page to narrow the search. The problem is that in our category, most sellers are too lazy to fill in this data when listing. They just rely on the title to show up in specific searches.

I also want to know: Is there a way to opt-out of this new update? I want the old version. My home computer was forced into the new search update, while my work computer is still on the old, very effective search engine. I am happy while searching at work, yet frustrated while searching at home.

chris13 · ‎04-07-2023

@ocrarecoin @zsrc If there is an A/B test with search in play, and you see different experiences from two computers using the same user ID... you can *maybe* revert them by clearing cookies. Cookies often are used to put one user into test group A, others in test group B. Thing is you just get reassigned to one group or the other with no cookie, so it's chance. Usually 50/50

This will only be a temporary fix since eventually the test is ended, the winner is declared and code moves forward. The left nav checkbox filters are sometimes called 'Attributization'. Some search engines eventually do much better when users adopt these since they normalize terms. Some folks suggest they are a poor replacement for a situation where a category is oversaturated with listings, though I am not sure what other options exist except category listing limits or making deeper categories available.

Search changes are always painful and challenging. As a buyer, brush up on using literal strings e.g. "quotes", and excluding terms e.g. This -notthat (negative terms)

As a seller if you feel users ignore attribute boxes, write careful listing text that doesnt spam keywords and choose the minimum number of attributes with great accuracy.

Hope this helps a little from a guy who used to test search engine code.