Search is Not Working For Dolls & Bears Category & Subsets

[pandorasartbox]

I did a search for "table" in Dolls & Bears and get: 

"0 results found in the Dolls & Bears category, so we searched in all categories"

There's no way there's not any tables in the Dolls and Bears or the subsets of Dollhouse Miniatures/Dollhouse Furniture category.

It's not finding a LOT of things - tried "desk", "couch", etc. 

This is definitely going to affect sellers.

[soh.maryl]

When I searched for "dollhouse furniture" in Dolls & Bears, there are over 160K listings.

There were several listings for table and chair sets on the 1st page and also some lots on that page that appeared to include tables.  

[wastingtime101]

Hey @pandorasartbox. Table is a pretty broad search term and will consistently default you to the home & garden category. This is what I did to get better search results:

Search for:  doll table

That will default you to the toys category and on the left you can switch over to dolls & bears where I'm seeing 8,400+ results. From there you can narrow down to different subcategories.

Search for: dollhouse table

That will default you to the dolls & bears category where I'm seeing 14,000+ results. From there you can narrow down to dollhouse miniatures category.

Then there are additional search filters you can use for even narrower results, like limiting search to US only, etc.

The part that I see as annoying, if you go directly to the dollhouse miniatures category:

https://www.ebay.com/b/Dollhouses-Dollhouse-Miniatures/1202/bn_1859745

Then you type table in the search bar, it kicks you out of the dollhouse category and takes you back to home & garden.

So in this case table is too general and it's better to use a more specific search term like dollhouse table and from there apply any filters you want.

Hope that helps some.

[pandorasartbox]

Thank you for your replies.

I think the biggest issue I have is that this exact search of a specific thing, say "desk" in the Dolls & Bears/Dollhouse Miniatures/ Dollhouse Furniture category WAS WORKING last week and now I need to do all of these workarounds.

[wastingtime101]

What you can do @pandorasartbox is search for whatever, say dollhouse desk then narrow your results with one click to the dollhouse subcategory. If you want any other filters, apply them. Then at the top you'll see an option that says save this search.

You can save the search and never have to start from scratch. Do that for your favorite searches and access them on this page with one click:

https://www.ebay.com/mye/myebay/savedsearches

You can also manage saved searches on that page: turn off e-mail alerts and delete searches you're no longer interested in.

[wastingtime101]

Similar discussion, linking it since eBay rep was asked to provide input:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Buying/Search-shows-0-results/m-p/33514190#M434711

[70camaross396]

I am having the same problem with all my searches in the Toys and Hobbies catagory.  I would always search Stepside and it would bring back 5000+ stepside toy trucks of all different kinds and now I get 0 results. 
This is aggrivating when they change **bleep** and break stuff that worked FOR YEARS with no problems. 

[70camaross396 · Accepted solution]

I just figured out if you put quotes " " around your search word it works and finds results.

[intuitive]

I posted about this problem earlier today:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Share-eBay-Technical-Issues/eBay-Advanced-Search-not-working-after-app...

It remains unresolved.

[intuitive]

You are justified in your frustration.   I appreciate those who take the time to suggest workarounds, but the average buyer can't be expected to seek out or devise workarounds for a search that was working just fine several days ago.   Most buyers won't even consider a workaround -- they'll just go looking for something else or close the window in disgust.   A very bad prospect for sellers. 

Search engine problems are becoming an annual event now.   In 2021 and 2022, changes to the Search engine resulted in the failure of title/description search.   In both instances it took 2-3 weeks to fix the problem.   Now here we are in 2023 -- the Advanced Search page was just updated and Search isn't working properly.   Again.