eBay Search Engine is Freaking Out!

[uncle_rico2013]

The search engine was working just fine until today. Before it would display listings with search words in the TITLE ONLY. Now it's displaying thousands of unwanted listings with search words in the title OR description text, no matter how insignificant. Anyone else having this problem???

[thomas25337]

I am getting items with no relation to my search,this happened once before and I tried rearranging words in my search some way ,I can't remember exactly what I did and it seemed to work again. This is a royal pain !!!

[thomas25337]

Tried another browser and worked ,deleted all ebay related cookies and that worked for me.

[brianvk]

BEST ANSWER! THIS WORKED!

[iamsound]

Same issues here with both emails from saved searches and when doing live searches using Chrome. Returning results that don't even include all of my search terms ANYWHERE in the listing text! Furthermore, even using Best Match, the listings that do include the search terms in the title of the auction AREN'T sorted to the top of the results making the searches useless!
Cleared all ebay cookies from Chrome and the problem is resolved. We will see tomorrow morning if my saved search emails are correct or not.

[richard233]

I'm sure they will fix it if only because of how much they will be losing.

Seriously, I took the time and adapted when they got rid of wild cards some time back and I'm

astounded that the things that worked are failing like crazy when there is no reason.

Their "advanced" setting is now different and that leads me to believe someone implimented

a change. 

Everything used to be simple.

It was set, more or less, to find anything we typed in in any order.

So

SearchWord1 SearchWord2 SearchWord3

Meant it had to have  all three pieces.

SearchWord1 SearchWord2 SearchWord3 (SearchWord4,SearchWord5)

Meant it had to have the first 3 and at least one of the two in the parathesis.

Anything between quotes was treated as a single search word even if there were spaces.

Now I can do a search and its being stupid about the stuff in parethesis.

Hey thanks EBay, no doubt my not finding things will save me a small fortune.

[huskydeb123]

How would clearing cookies resolve the issue with eBay's saved search emails? I've found the search issue (my searches and search emails) to be intermittent, so I doubt that clearing cookies fixes anything.

[mr.skyline]

This is terrible, I don't have time to go through all the unwanted items! I'm giving up on it. Lost my custom, fools.

[hvnycollector]

I'm having the same problem. Ebay doesn't seem to understand people want very specific searches.

[highway98e]

I'm also getting bad search results on my main work machine while the same exact search seems to work fine on one of my laptops.  I called this in to customer support this morning (8/28). She says she got a similar call about search yesterday.  During the call we tried various OS's and various browsers, both logged in as me and not logged in (as a guest). Results seem to be unrelated to OS or browser or whether user is logged in or not, and a proper search result versus a bad search result seems to be a totally random thing, maybe depending on which random eBay server you are connected to.  IOW: this sounds like it is gonna be a b*tch for them to debug unless they roll back whatever they did during the past Thursday's maintainance.

[top-down-fever]

Same here.  Read responses here and cleared my cache and it is back to normal.  Thanks for posting.

[yackist]

I've had the same problem for several months now.  For instance I just searched for "countersink set'.  Among the >17,000 results are:

-

2xUniversal Car Rearview Blind Spot Mirror 360°Adjustable Convex Wide

4 Colors Durable DIY Craft Oil Based Ink Pad Print for Stamp Rubber Paper Wood

Christmas Wine Bottle Wrap Cover Champagne Bag Gift Candy Pouch Santa Suit#1

4x AA to C Size Battery Holder Adapter High Quality

1pc 4mm Coated Drill Bit Hole Saw for Glass Ceramic Tiles Granite Marble DIY

-

Many, if not most, of the results are inappropriate for the search and are not what I want.  It takes much too long to comb through the results to find the few that are of interest.

-

I have been buying stuff on Ebay for nearly 20 years.  I want to buy more, and I know it is in Ebay somewhere, but I cannot find it.  It is sort of like shopping at a Walmart that has been hit by a tornado that mixed everything together.

-

If Ebay wants to change the Search function to help some users (although I don't know who would desire such a non-specific search), they should at least retain an option in Advanced Search to use the traditional, rigorous search.  Change and improvement are not synonyms.

[austexvintage]

Same search problem here for a week.Looks like Title search is defaulting to 'Title and Description' searches....

Clicking on 'Search Title and Description' brings up the same returns as NOT clicking 'Search Title and Description'.

I read ebay was tweaking the search engine to bring up other items.. I sssume to gain sales but this is crazy and annoying, Calling ebay CSR said to use Categories search, but I don't want to.

This really hampers looking for specific titles on ebay. I hope it is a glitch they will fix soon.

[cooljonnyb]

Good Lord!!

I am getting hundreds of non-related retrns on items not even close to my search.  I'm an eBay "oldie" and learned the old search language, way back when.  I regretted losing that, but I understand eBay wanted to steer me to impulse buys.

But this is ridiculous!!

Don't chase me away after all these years, eBay.  Amazon has already become my first stop!!

[dad*n*lad]

Perhaps this explains why I went from 9:51 PM on 8/26 to 9:32 AM on 8/28 with zero orders where normally have 8-10 orders per day. I do understand that sales are variable but this is stretching the limits of randomness. I also saw a sharp increase in Amazon orders during the same time, perhaps folks just gave up on finding what they wanted on eBay.

[*hkharris*collectibles*]

Horrible!  I'm getting thousands of insignificant listings when doing a specific search.  Vintage Barbie Doll search brings up a bunch of automobiles and clothing?  Really slowing thingsdown.