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Free shipping banner (inaccurate) in search engine results - explanation?
I searched for an item online using a search engine (DuckDuckGo) and the thumbnail results showed listings from Ebay, Etsy, etc. One of the Ebay listings had a banner over the photo saying "Free shipping". So I clicked on that. Once on Ebay, the listing did NOT offer free shipping. I contacted the seller, who said they have never offered free shipping, so was at a loss to explain.
Anybody else experience this, or know the reason it happens?
2 comments
jonathanbrightlight
·1 year agoWas the banner part of the photo itself, or was it possibly added by DuckDuckGo but was not visible on the item page anywhere? The search engine may be incorrectly gathering it's data (for instance, if another item that did have Free Shipping was being advertised on the item page you were looking at, and DuckDuckGo's system incorrectly assumed that the Free Shipping wording shown was for the listing you were looking at). If so, that is completely outside of eBay's control.
lwylie
OP1 year agoThanks. Yeah, no doubt is search engine-related. Or AI. Maybe an AI 'hallucination'. I wish search engines would revert to the way they were 20 years ago when I as the end user could peruse the results and determine what results I wanted to pursue. Now the results are more 'curated' and less objective IMO, which makes them much less useful.