Search is broken, exclusions via '-' exclude non-matching items

[trustedsales99]

One example is '1972 c10 reverse' vs '1972 c10 reverse -led' -- the latter excludes items without 'led' in either the title or description.  I've noticed the wonky search behavior in the past also but this is just ridiculous!

Please someone tell me that their QA team isn't really this bad and that I'm just doing it wrong.

[dhbookds]

do you mean without lead.........the mineral?

[trustedsales99]

No, led as in light emitting diode but that's not relevant to the issue as far as I know

[buyselljack2016]

1972 c10 reverse -led

Should/would show only items without "led"

(-)  excludes items with the word led after the (-)

[trustedsales99]

It excludes items without led in the title or description; these items should not be excluded but they are.

[buyselljack2016]

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@trustedsales99 wrote:
It excludes items without led in the title or description

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Well, in the title at least  !!!!!

86 returns without the  "- led"

2 returns with the  "- led"

Works as advertised for me 🙂

[trustedsales99]

There should be many more results when excluding 'led' than 2

[berserkerplanet]

You are correct.

I got 85 results with no exclusion. Adding -led produced 2 results. There should be 8 results.

Gonna be a Merry Christmas for sellers this season with this.

[gunncomp]

My issue is that the exclusion actually yields more results than without it.  For example:

A search for cash register gives 593 results.

A search for cash register -pos gives 1936 results

A search for cash register -electronic gives 1933 results

A search for cash register -lcd gives 2139 results

What a joke.

Clearly, this is unusable and is one of the many reasons that I only use ebay as a last resort these days.  I have seen it deteriorate in virtually every way over the years I was a seller.  It became clear some years ago that ebay were doing everything in thier power to discourage small and medium sellers and so I closed my store of over 1100 items as it just wasn't worth it with constantly changing standards, bug ridden software, lack of real support, throttled exposure and a host of other issues.  Thank god we now have an infintely better alternative.

[eburtonlab]

When I search for "cash register" (without quotes) I see 3651 results,

but the search category limits itself to the "Point of Sale Equipment" category.

Changing to "All categories" yields 12,360 results.

Searches for "cash register -lcd" yields 3831 results in that single category,

and 12,651 in all categories.

Clearly the ebay search engine is not exclusively logical -- there is some

optimization going on. The search engine is trying to predict what you are

looking for; certain key words are treated as equivalent to various synonyms.

When you search for these key words, the search engine may include some

results that are deemed equivalent to your search words (such as common

misspellings). This usually helps to find extra listings.

Unfortunately, when those key words are used as exclusion terms, you may also

inadvertantly be excluding synonyms that you want to include.

If you want to search for an exact word, without synonyms or misspellings, you

can put that word in quotes. Unfortunately, I don't think that technique works for

exclusion terms.

I think original poster runs into trouble trying to exclude LED from the search

when the search engine deems that synonyms for LED should be excluded as

well. The search engine *is* finding listings that use "72" instead of just "1972"

in that original search, which is generally what you want to happen.