Ebays search engine has not been fixed

[ksedar]

I am not sure what they are doing to it but I know they are doing something messed up and this is why I say this.  I use a third party ebay search engine crawler and that looks for listings with keywords that I am internested in buying.  I have two searches set up to look for "brooches" and the word "broken" which is a weird search but I digress.  Normally for the last year Ive used it It returns to me each morning the max amount of listings it can find, always like 25 or more, whatever their limit is.  This makes sense because there are tons of brooches and broken things on ebay, right?  Well for the last 3 or 4 days I have gotten ONE result for the keyword "broken" and 5 returns with the word "brooch" in them.  They are not making available to buyers the massive amount of listings they have.  Either that or they are cutting off the automatic search I use but if thats the case, then I would get no returns on my auto search, right?

[redlinear]

😂

[redlinear]

I'd love to, but I can't find it

[redlinear]

@ksedar ,  
  I'm not sure how a person can tell if it's broken, or working as designed?
 Best Match is not anything that's ever been explained to anybody.  
Common sense would dictate that if you entered four words...best match would be those four words, in the order you entered them, in items TITLES.  And then filter down from there.
However, your four words are not being pulled from the title.  They are being pulled from title, item specifics, and other areas.  Then they are being sorted by promoted, time listed, seller status, and who knows what else.
  The vast majority of results of a four word search may not have any of those words in the title.

As a seller, I no longer have 80 characters of title to enter keywords.  I now have thousands of characters available to place keywords in item specifics boxes.
And so does everybody else. And they know it.

[cardxcraft]

I think I may know what's going on.  The new Ebay sort by lowest price match is only giving a tiny fraction of returned results.  One has to manually select show all lowest price search results.  Its a link at the top of searches once you've selected sort by lowest price. 

As an example, I search 1930 US Stamps, best match returns several thousand, but, if one is searching by lowest price, only a few hundred results are returned.  As mentioned above, a user needs to manually select show me all the results.

To my point:  the crawler you're using is most likely searching by lowest price, and thus only a few results are returned.

Off topic: if one searches within a large store, or any size store, by lowest price, the app does not give you the option of including all returned results.  You'll only see the lowest price "best match", so to speak.

[retro_entertainment_collectibles]

Odds are whatever the application the OP is using it's making REST calls to the eBay API and by the sounds of it at just a hazard guess since they've done work (yes?) I the search engine the API may not be returning proper results.  Would also explain why some folks saying their views and such are down as external services likely use the API vs spidering and scraping web data off HTML pages.

[ksedar]

Well the search crawler I use has a lot of parameters I could put in, just like ebay search.  Like new used and min or max price.  I have all those set to nothing which is wide open and should give me the max  return in listings.  Maybe ebay search isn't broken really but changed somehow so that the third party searchers haven't updated their programming or something like Retro said.  Its been weird all week really.  My impressions and page views are going up like 20% but not sales...haha.  I do sell a lot in a saturated niche so I expect to struggle to make sales in those catagories.

[chapeau-noir]

@ksedar

Automatedsearches has a subreddit and I think the developer may chat there.  Right now Reddit is having blackout issues due to their CEO actions, but Automatedsearches may not be part of that. See if you can get some information about this from the source.

I see no reason why a search engine would be blocking external searches - the entire reason for our having switched to GTC (good till closing) is to avoid broken URLs and improve external searching.

[ksedar]

One last post to close this thread.  This morning my automated search returned the full amount of listings you can get in one email: 100.  So whatever had changed has been restored in the search engine.  Thanks for all the input!

[siamjane8]

@inhawaii - you would not find buyers complaining here- its a selling board. if you have not heard anyone personally complain about the terrible search on ebay- then either you dont ask people or people in hawaii dont really use ebay that much (which is possible- given the small population)

     It is literally a daily conversation out here on the east coast. Just last Saturday, at a picnic- i overheard a group of 8 people saying how it has gotten so bad that they just dont bother anymore. 

     Im glad it works perfectly for you and what you search for but your experience is not shared by the majority of buyers.   Believe me, if it did- ebay sales and GMV would not be plummeting, it would be growing like all the other selling platforms.......I just do not understand how, with all the evidence, all the statistic, and all the obvious cause and effect observations.......some here on the boards still refuse to see that ebay plays a large role in the problems we face and the drop in sales. 

[sextons-sweet-deals]

buyers can only buy what eBay gives them in their search results. 

I do feel there is an issue. I made a comment on a different post about not finding my Notre Dame yearbooks listed in a search. My search was just 'Notre Dame Yearbook'. In my listing title I also had 'university'. That should have not mattered, but it did. 

Once I revised my listings and decided to take 'university' out of my listing title to see what would happen, I was able to find my listing in search. 

[luxgoods]

excellent reply!!!

[inhawaii]

I simply asked for a item/item number that is not searchable.

As expected, I didn't get one.

[inhawaii]

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@siamjane8 wrote:

people or people in hawaii dont really use ebay that much (which is possible- given the small population)

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I believe there are 10 other states with less population than Hawaii.

Would that go for them as well?

New Hampshire

Maine

Montana

Rhode Island

Delaware

South Dakota

North Dakota

Alaska

Vermont

Wyoming

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@sextons-sweet-deals wrote:

buyers can only buy what eBay gives them in their search results. 

I do feel there is an issue. I made a comment on a different post about not finding my Notre Dame yearbooks listed in a search. My search was just 'Notre Dame Yearbook'. In my listing title I also had 'university'. That should have not mattered, but it did. 

Once I revised my listings and decided to take 'university' out of my listing title to see what would happen, I was able to find my listing in search. 

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@sextons-sweet-deals 

@siamjane8 

Unsure what you, myself and others are seeing is either bad AI or weird eBay algorithms. Unfortunately it is the new normal. Search within eBay used to work great. Now. Not so much. Throw in eBay's urge to purge sub categories it is causing sellers to list (drop) items in inaccurate categories due to poor available remaining choices. I spot items in the wrong category lately routinely. Not how it should be. Ages ago sellers got their fingers slapped for putting items in the wrong categories. 

-Lotz

@inhawaii 

In cases of searching for newish listings just created if you use the full address with number listings will show. Otherwise they appear to be on tape delay due to indexing from a buyers perspective. I find it strange that 1 is able to find an antique listing from several years ago with Google...50/50 it will display in living color but if it is 30 seconds over 90 days you are more likely to stumble across a living purple unicorn vs it loading from eBay.