Search is now horrible

Question

I just want to say the search function is absolutely horrible now. It "autocorrects" to the wrong thing, it puts completely different items at the top, and instead of returning relevant results it returns sponsored results. This has made eBay excessively cumbersome to use. I'm truly shocked that such a big company could make such a poorly thought out change.

eburtonlab · Answer

If a search that has worked well previously suddenly starts behaving badly, 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 search issues by putting one of your keywords in quotes. This forces eBay to bypass the "smart" features and to search for the literal keywords without any substitution or category switching. You may have to manually specify your category once again.

Using a desktop browser, find the "Feedback" icon that appears in the lower right corner of the search results page to let eBay page developers know about your search issues.