Talk about streamlining results...
Today I was doing research as a seller. I searched for Collectibles > Postcards and got 8,400,000 results. 4 of the sorts gave this result. However 2 of the sorts were throttled to such an extreme I consider this an eBay error. When I clicked on Sort > newly listed I got 51 listings and NO message. Clicking on this repeatedly, I got 48, 46, and eventually 8,400,000 results. When I clicked on Sort > Price + Shipping: lowest first I 60 results (lowest $2.25 and most $9.99 and above) and the message:
- We’ve streamlined your search results to show you the best listings. See more results
22 comments
tobaccocardyahoo
·3 years agoWhy would anyone perform such a worthless search?
Why should Ebay waste any cpu cycles or bandwidth on such a search?
It is not like the old days when people had nothing better to do with their time than spend their lives online on Ebay.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoWhy would anyone perform such a worthless search?
As a first step in some other, more targeted search.
Suppose you wanted to find all the postcard auctions ending in the next 24 hours with at least one current active bid. Using postcards as a search term allows you to do that:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=postcards&_sacat=0&LH_Auction=1&LH_Time=1&_ftrt=901&_ftrv=24&LH_NOB=1&_sabdlo=1&_sop=1
Just because a particular search does not seem worthwhile to you does not mean that it is not useful to someone else.
cardxcraft
·3 years agoGood point. I do exactly as you state when searching for postcards. I start broad and then narrow it down. Other times, if I don't want to miss anything, I'll stay broad and maybe add a filter of those postcard item specifics that were "non-specified".
sextons-sweet-deals
·3 years agoYou have to be more specific in your search. Just entering 'postcards' is just an open free for all.
What does the postcard you seek need to contain? State? Country? Landmark? certain era of time?
cardxcraft
·3 years agoI've performed many specific search results in the categories of stamps, postal history, first flight covers, and postcards.
My personal experience showed a discard rate of between 65% to 98% when sorting by lowest price versus best match.
Discard rate was calculated using original, best match search results and then sorting by lowest price.
Discard rate was the percentage of results dropped after sorting by lowest price first.
luckythewinner
·3 years agoI searched for Collectibles > Postcards
Can you explain what you mean by this? Did you browse a category, or enter search terms?
and got 8,400,000 results
At just one second per listing, browsing 8 million records would take over 90 days. Is that a realistic search?
redlinear
·3 years agoThat's where the lowest price stuff is hidden.
coolections
·3 years agoThat is the way it is suppose to work. As a buyer I would never want to see 8,400,000 postcards. I would be two years older before I saw them all. The good news is if you want to spend hours upon hours looking Ebay give you an option so "see all'' results.
mam98031
·3 years agoThey have done this for a very long time.
somanypostcards
OP3 years agoI agree eBay has streamlined sort by lowest first for a very long time. However to only list 51 items out of 8,400,000 items has NOT been done for a very long time. Also listing the lowest item as $2.25 (omitting ALL the hundreds of lower priced items under $2.00) has NOT been done for a very long time. Finally, to my knowledge sort by newly listed has NOT been streamlined in the past. Finally, omitting the streamlined message to see more results is definitely an error which pops up occasionally.
mam98031
·3 years agoNo, not lowest first. That isn't what I said. The order in which the return displays is up to the person doing the search. Certainly most people likely have the lowest one first set as their default. But that is the person searching, NOT Ebay.
redlinear
·3 years ago"We’ve streamlined your search results to show you the best listings. See more results
You only see that with a lowest price 1st filter.
mam98031
·3 years agoIf that is what you set in your defaults, then yes. Have you checked your settings.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoI agree eBay has streamlined sort by lowest first for a very long time. However to only list 51 items out of 8,400,000 items has NOT been done for a very long time.
Yes, something about the "lowest first" sort has changed relatively recently -- in the last three or four months, I think. It may not affect every "lowest first" search, but for certain keywords, the results shown are quite different compared to the recent past: the filtering is much stricter, and the "streamlining" message does not always appear as it should. There may be no indication at all that there are any other results to be seen, and no link to "see more results". Results are often limited to a single page.
I understand eBay's rationale for filtering the "lowest first" sort order, but the nature of that filtering has changed drastically, to the point where the sort is often entirely unusable.
There is a big difference between "streamlining" and silently eliminating 99.99999999% of the search results.
Possibly two or more "smart" search features are interacting in an unexpected manner, and this is the result.
In situations like this, I recommend using the "Feedback" icon in the lower right corner of the search results or the "Tell us what you think" on many other pages, which leads to a form like this:
https://connect.ebay.com/srv/survey/a/search.srp.node
If you use the link from your own search results, the developers will get some info about the search you were performing, which may be helpful.
somanypostcards
OP3 years agoOK, today I went to the eBay selling page and at the top in Shop by category I entered collectibles postcards. 8,400,000 results were returned in Sort ending soonest. When I clicked on Sort nearest first and Sort Price + Shipping: highest first 8,400,000 results were also returned. When I clicked on Sort best match 6,800,000 results were returned with no streamlining message so no link to see the missing 1,600,000 results. When I clicked on Sort newly listed only 55 results were returned with no message about streamlining the search results so no link to see the missing 8,399,945 results. And when I searched on Sort Price + Shipping: lowest first only 60 results were returned (only 3 under $2.00 and none $1.00 or less) with the streamlining search results message, so clicking See more results did show 8,400,000 results. As recommended above, I reported this extreme throttling to eBay using the "Tell us what you think" link with its 500 characters limitation.
a_c_green
·3 years agoI remember a discussion about this a few months ago. I wouldn't call it "throttling" because the trigger causing the problem isn't the search itself, but simply how the results are to be ordered. It looks more like a coding bug involving the sort by total price (either lowest first or highest first) in which duplicates are discarded by mistake. (i.e. They're not duplicate listings; they're listings whose total price just happens to match others.)
For example, if your search gave you 100 results where 40 items happened to total up to the same price, you'd only see 1 of those with 39 others discarded, for a total of 61 results instead of 100, but only if you were sorting by Lowest First.
To be clear, de-duplicating a result set is a valid process that might be needed, depending on the purpose of your search. My opinion, based on a few rounds of testing the last time this topic came up, was that the result ordering option for Lowest First (and possibly also Highest First) was also de-duping the results, where the other ordering options were not.
I'm not claiming that my theory covers all eventualities (for starters, prices are displayed along with Shipping, but not totaled on-screen, so my mental addition may have missed some other details involved), but the results I saw seemed to point in that direction. The inability to actually speak with anyone involved in the website coding makes it hard to get these kinds of questions resolved.
somanypostcards
OP3 years agoIn the 60 lowest price postcards returned, 6 had an identical total price of $9.99 + free shipping, so "de-duplicating" is NOT happening. Throttle is likely the wrong word. Some eBay sorts CONCEAL almost all results. It is this extreme concealing I consider an error as 2 of 6 sort results (newly listed and Price + Shipping lowest first) in my search of postcards on eBay were meaningless.
a_c_green
·3 years agoWell, it's good to have specifics to look at and thank you for that. I don't mean to suggest that it's purely de-duping (that is, not properly), but if you get 60 lowest-price postcards returned and 54 of them are different, that suggests to me that it was at least making an attempt to do so.
In any case, I don't disagree with you that there's something weird going on with that choice of result ordering (and again, the results are getting screened during the sort process, not during the search process, since changing the sort order is all that's required for the problem to occur). I'm not sure that it's intentional (I wrote code for decades, and I can't think of any reason why this would be intentionally done as part of a pricing sort), but at the same time, it does not appear that anyone in-house can be bothered to either look into the problem or explain why it's not a problem.
mam98031
·3 years agoThat is similar to the way it has always worked since Cassini became sitewide in about April of 2014.
somanypostcards
OP3 years agoStreamlining (or concealing) results when sorting by Price + Shipping lowest first has occurred since April of 2014, usually with 50% or more of the total results shown. However, I am talking here about extreme streamlining (or extreme concealing) of results with well less than 1% or the total results shown. Than is NOT the way it has always worked! It is a recent glitch, IMHO.
coolections
·3 years agoWhen you search Ebay you have to be more specific about the search. Typing a single word postcard will never give you all the results. It would take you 30 days to go through each one. Use what Ebay gives you on the left side of the page to narrow your search. I also recommend you use at least 3 words that describes what it is you are actually looking for.
eburtonlab
·3 years agoTyping a single word postcard will never give you all the results.
The OP knows how to search and also knows the limitations of eBay's search results; that was just an example provided by the OP to show the extreme filtering going on with the "Lowest first" sort order.
Nonetheless, there are situations where a user wants to start with the broadest possible keyword search to pull in all the results in a single category before using other filters to limit the search to a manageable number of results. In the past it was possible to simply browse an entire category, or to filter without searching, but that may not work for some of the higher level categories any longer, and it may be necessary to start with a general keyword search.