What are searches so wrong?

[i-fish1]

I often search an EXACT search string and get nothing. But a partial string shows the item. The topper was this search today. "seasons greetings from mickey and minnie kids". The 4th item returned was titled "Leather Bumbag Belt Pouch Purse Vintage Leisure Unisex Handmade Small Bag". Not one word matched my search. I'm sure there are millions of items for sale with Mickey in the string so how did two items about leather hand bags end up on my first results page?

[randygar]

It's still better than amazon's search.  🙂

ebay's search has basic and advanced modes.  Advanced mode is generally much less aggravating.  To kick the search into advanced mode without needing to go through the advanced search page, try excluding a random keyword with '-' at the end of your search, like -TotallyRandom.

If you do an exact string  (double quotes) search that doesn't match anything, it will ignore the quotes...  and that gives you a basic search, where it happily ignores what you're actually searching for.

Sometimes you can get better results if you search for an ORed search with only one term, by putting it in parentheses, like (words to search for).  The logic it uses for OR queries seems to be somewhere between the exact string of double quotes and bare keywords.

I wish ebay would bring back wildcard searches, or go really fancy and let us query with regexs...

[eburtonlab]

I get no results for your mickey and minnie search, but several partial match results are shown.

The bag listing appears to have a holiday keyword dump inserted in the body of the description -- including each of your selected keywords. That might account for why it appears under "Results matching fewer words".

When a search returns no exact matches, eBay tries alternatives to find something to display. That typically involves dropping one or more of the keywords. Apparently it also involves expanding the search to the body of the description as well.

In this particular case, the search is being gamed by a seller including a keyword dump in the body of the listing. Of course that only works when users are searching the body of the description, or when a search has few or no exact results. But that qualifies as "search and browse manipulation", I believe, making that listing reportable.

[joust62]

You've got it right.

Unfortunately, the Search Tips under eBay's Advanced Search feature are too basic and don't document my search methods like they used to in past decades. The same old methods still seem to yield decent results, though.

. Use parentheses instead of quotes to yield desired keywords or phrases.

. Use commas within the parentheses to list logical OR keywords or phrases.

. Use multiple parentheses to indicate logical AND

. Optionally, use + before a word or open parentheses to (hopefully) yield required keywords.

. Optionally, use - before a word or open parentheses to (hopefully) omit undesired keywords.

Example entered into basic search box:

(star wars) revan (30th,expanded,34,toyfare) -(stickers,6",6-inch,6 inch,black)

Above should yield results containing the phrase star wars AND the word revan AND at least one word from the list of 30th OR expanded OR 34 OR toyfare, but NOT any result that contains stickers OR 6" OR 6-inch OR 6 inch OR black.

I realize that search is supposed to ignore most punctuation/special characters but I still type that way to this day out of habit and I fool myself into thinking it still helps the results sometimes.

I do agree with this thread and others that eBay Search is often temporarily broken or glitchy and the "Results matching fewer words" section is too often an irrelevant mess or catch-all. Maybe due to metrics or marketing/promotional algorithm experiments that go on constantly at eBay. But nothing is as "broke" as Amazon search. 😉

[eburtonlab]

Unfortunately, the Search Tips under eBay's Advanced Search feature are too basic and don't document my search methods like they used to in past decades. The same old methods still seem to yield decent results, though.

eBay simplified the Advanced Search help page and removed all the practical search tips and examples, unfortunately.

Many of the same tips can still be found on the old Help page on eBay's Ireland site, though:

https://www.ebay.ie/pages/help/search/search-commands.html

There may be some slight differences between what is described and actual current practice -- for instance, even when using search commands, keywords will still match words in the item-specifics, though keyword-to-keyword substitutions and keyword-to-category mapping will not occur. And using a plus sign will not bypass search expansion features as indicated.

[urban_picker]

Yeah it is a mess! I am getting ready to call the problem in. You type in something like "Cardinals baseball hat" and so many other hats that have nothing to do with that pop up. You type in Van Halen greatest hits cassettes and so many other item bands come up also. It's a complete mess. It was not always this way because I search the cardinals search pretty often to see ho my items place being I have 500 of them in my store.

[urban_picker]

I called the issue in with my two examples. Funny things is on the one example of the "Cardinals baseball hat" she got all cardinals hats as to where I am getting so much more. But on the Van Halen greatest Hits cassette example she saw something is wrong so she is making a ticket

[selsa84]

Search has been a mess for a while now, that's why I use to purchase around $15k of books and paper ephemera a year but not any more. They show what they want you to see and purchase. There are tons of posts on the community boards about the horrible search algorithm, and you'll always see the cl's saying it's you and not ebay who don't know what they are doing.

[eburtonlab]

You type in something like "Cardinals baseball hat" and so many other hats that have nothing to do with that pop up.

I searched Cardinals baseball hat and got 4200+ results in all categories. Of the first 200 results sorted by Newly Listed, all but a handful had Cardinals in the title, though some were for college or high school teams of the same name rather than the St. Louis team, and a few included cardinal as a color rather than a team name. 

The remaining listings appeared to all have Cardinal as a brand in the item-specifics.

A slightly different search, limited to the Baseball-MLB fan apparel category:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=st+louis+cardinals+cap&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_odkw=...

[eburtonlab]

You type in Van Halen greatest hits cassettes and so many other item bands come up also.

A search for Van Halen greatest hits cassette certainly turns up a lot more Hank Williams, Jr than I would have expected, for some odd reason. No indication of Van Halen in the item-specifics, either. Even when using the Van Halen Artist filter, extraneous artists with no apparent connection to Van Halen appear in the results:

I suspect that eBay's search algorithm has identified some artists that are connected to some other artists that once played with Van Halen, and decided that those other artists are equivalent to Van Halen when searching.

In fact, when sorting that search by Best Match, currently 11 of the top 12 results are Hank Williams, Jr. and none are Van Halen.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_dcat=176983&_fsrp=1&_from=R40&_nkw=van+halen+greatest+hits+cassette...

A slightly better search for Van-Halen greatest-hits cassette:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=van-halen+greatest-hits+cassette&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDes...