ebay search not working properly (omitting items that match my words)

[capt_mikes_island]

This morning I did a search for "leatherman crunch" which returned 13 items.  I was really looking for mr. crunch, but knew it would populate in with that search.  It did not.   Below the 13 items, labelled as "results matching fewer words",  I found listings for mr. crunch tools, in addition to others, that had the words "leatherman" and "crunch" in them.   So the claim that these results match fewer words is wrong.

A search for "leatherman mr crunch" returned 26 results all of which contained the words "leatherman" and "crunch" but none of these listings returned on my original search.

The search is acting as if I put quotation marks around the search words and is limiting results to an exact match rather than searching for listings that "include" those words.  I hope this is a glitch but I have a sinking feeling.  Please tell me ebay is not facebookizing the search function and giving me what it thinks I want rather than just fulfilling my search.

[eburtonlab]

eBay's search has all sorts of "smart" search expansion features. Sometimes it appears to group keywords together, even if you do not explicitly request that. Often it will direct a search into a particular category automatically and ignore results in other categories. Sometimes keyword order matters.

You can bypass many of the "smart" features by using specific search commands such as exclusions, quotes or parentheses to perform a Boolean "OR" search.

Try the following search to bypass the "smart" features:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=leatherman+%22crunch%22&_sacat=0

[capt_mikes_island]

Did you read my post?  Would you consider it a smart search feature to not show all results that contain the specific words as a default?  Is it a smart feature to display results that do match all keywords under a banner that says "results matching fewer words"?

Ebay didn't isolate me to a category or present a banner stating that they were "streamlined results" which I always bypass.  It is showing a standard search of all categories.  And I have not filtered it in any way manually either.

[eburtonlab]

Would you consider it a smart search feature to not show all results that contain the specific words as a default?

There is a world of difference between smart and "smart".

[capt_mikes_island]

"Noted"  : )

[2guysandawarehouse]

ebay's search has performed extremely poorly for many years ... I often use duckduckgo (or other browser search engines) to get the proper results.

it simply became unusable when ebay provide a page full of results of with NO matching terms intermixed with a couple that did.

absolutely horrible and a very serious step backwards from what they once provided.

[eburtonlab]

it simply became unusable when ebay provide a page full of results of with NO matching terms intermixed with a couple that did.

Keyword substitution can be bypassed by using quotes or exclusions.

Keep in mind that if a keyword appears in the item-specifics -- not just the title -- eBay considers that a valid match.

Sometimes eBay performs entirely unwanted or inappropriate keyword substitutions. There was a period a couple of years ago where a search for any cartoon character in the Toys and Hobbies category returned every other possible cartoon character as a match. Many folks using "Best Match" by default did not notice the problem, since the Best Match returned the correct results first; but users sorting by other means such as "Ending Soonest" had a hard time finding the actual matches mixed in with the inappropriate non-matching results.

If you have an example of a search that is not performing as you expect it should, please post a link; someone may be able to provide some suggestions to make the search perform better.