Why does the amount of search results you get depend on the way they are sorted?

Question

Why does the amount of search results you get depend on the way they are sorted? You can get up to thousands more by having them sorted as the best match. I feel like you ought to be able to get the ones with the lowest price first and still get all of the possible search results. But You almost always only get exactly 160 search results if you have them sorted from lowest to highest price

eburtonlab · Answer

@jpeezybespeedn

The "Price plus shipping: lowest first" sort order provides filtered results -- often drastically filtered. And the option to "see more results" may not always be shown as it should. The filtering may vary depending on the keywords used.

If you encounter a drastically filtered result for a keyword search using a desktop browser, you should be able to use the "Feedback" link in the lower right corner of the search results to provide feedback on your search to eBay developers. The more users provide info, the more likely something is to be done about the over-filtration problem.

You can avoid that problem entirely by using a different sort order.

If you have few results, try sorting by "highest first", then starting at the end of the results, scroll up instead of down. This also avoids the problem of variation listings with low-cost variations appearing at the top of the lowest-first sort.

If you have a bookmarked or saved lowest-first search that you use a lot, you can avoid the filtration by adding the following to the end of the search URL, then saving the resulting search:

&_blrs=recall_filtering

"Best match" sort order has the opposite issue: that sort seems to show additional, less-relevant results compared to other sorts.