eBay Search Results have become generalized and useless over the last week?

[lithdagger]

I'm not sure what changed on eBay's end, because I changed no settings or how I search for things. Now when I search I get a ton on non-specific generalized results not for the specific item I am looking for, but items that are simply in the same catagory. This inflates my results with useless information, bloats my pages so I need to spend much more time sifting through them, and straight up ignores the specifics of the item I searched for.

IDK what has changed, but it has ruined the Search function on eBay.

How can I revert this and make searching on eBay a useful tool again, or why has eBay decided to implement this horrible and counterproductive change?

[eburtonlab]

What are you searching for and how are you searching?

If you can provide a link to your search results and an indication of what results you want to find or avoid, someone might be able to provide some practical suggestions to get better results.

Some general tips: avoid "Best Match" sort order; if keywords are being substituted or corrected by eBay, try putting one of your search keywords in quotes to force eBay to return only exact, literal matches. You may have to choose the category manually after your initial search.

If one of your search keywords matches a category name, all the items in that category become potential matches to your search, since the keyword will appear in the item-specifics of all those listings. Try adding more search keywords that are unique to the items of interest.

You can use the "Tell us what you think" link in the search results to report specific issues with your search results.

[lithdagger]

I know how to use search terms and use eBay. It is 100% the fault with eBay's 'Smart' Search function, or they changed how filters work. The canned response of blaming the user for incompetence on their end is not a great approach, just adds clutter to this thread.

[eburtonlab]

It is hard to know exactly what problem you are encountering from a description that just says "generalized and useless". Perhaps something has changed recently, but if so, what?

If you want a non-canned response, provide some actual details or examples of what you are encountering, please.

"Smart" search features are disabled when using advanced search commands: quotes, exclusions and parenthetical "OR" searches.