Keyword Spam Ruining Searches/Reporting Does Nothing

[ninjabum87]

What us the point of reporting listings manipulating search results? I primarily use eBay to buy cards and the search function has turned to trash since it migrated from title only.

I decided to try and report a bunch of listings gumming up searches by listing 20+ players, teams, totally wrong card type, totally wrong player auto type and every single one of them came back "We looked into your report and didn’t find the listing to be in violation of our policy.  This determination was made by a customer service agent."

What is the point of having a policy if it doesn't get enforced?

You can't tell me listing an Alperen Sengun prizm silver as a Steph Curry Auto, Color Blast parallel, Giannis Antenotkounpo, Steph Curry, Lebron James, plus 15 other players isn't search manipulation.

Give us back title-only searches or enforce your policies **bleep**.

If this trend continues over time it's going to render saved searches useless.

[eburtonlab]

You can't tell me listing an Alperen Sengun prizm silver as a Steph Curry Auto, Color Blast parallel, Giannis Antenotkounpo, Steph Curry, Lebron James, plus 15 other players isn't search manipulation.

Keyword spamming sellers can certainly be annoying, but with very little effort you should be able to filter out most of those listings. It might be as simple as using a couple of well-chosen filters or a single exclusion term.

The more unrelated keywords a seller includes, the easier it is to filter out all those listings. All you have to do is find one keyword that is unrelated to your actual search -- one name, one team, one sport in some cases -- and all the results that contain that keyword can be easily excluded and ignored.

And since most of the keyword spamming sellers are lazy, they tend to reuse the same spammed keyword lists over and over, so once you have found a way to block that seller, all of the seller's listings can continue to be blocked if you save your search to use it again.

And for crafty sellers that make it harder to filter out their listings, you can block those sellers individually by username.

What was your original search? Most likely there is a quick modification that can save you a lot of time and avoid those unwanted results.

[ninjabum87]

The problem lies when it's so pervasive that listings you want to see also keyword spam so you're excluding results you want to see by saying -lebron -luka, etc. If youre searching for a Curry card where that seller also spams Lebron, Luka, etc in the description, you're eliminating it from your search as well.

Ebay simply allowing us to do an advanced search on "title only" would eliminate 99% of these. It blows my mind that isn't an option. 

[eburtonlab]

If youre searching for a Curry card where that seller also spams Lebron, Luka, etc in the description, you're eliminating it from your search as well.

In that case you need to decide which is more important: finding what you want to find, or excluding what you want to exclude. You may not be able to do both reliably at the same time.

My strategy is to exclude the easily excluded clumsy keyword-spammed listings so I can quickly focus on what I want. If I can't find what I want, I might widen the search until I get results.

For sellers that make it hard to exclude their keyword-spammed listings, I will block those sellers by username, and report the worst cases to eBay.

Keyword-spamming a rare, valuable item is a pointless waste of everyone's time -- even more-so than keyword spamming low-value listings. If those sellers lose my business because of that, that is their fault and their problem, not mine.

[ninjabum87]

Yeah that's the crux of the issue. Allowing us to search title only and ignore description keywords at will would fix this easily.

If I'm looking for a rare item that people use for keyword spamming my choice now is be bombarded with false alarm emails or miss a relevant item and it sucks.