HOW could Google have more access to eBay's listings than eBay's buyers?

[gurlcat]

I've often seen the claim that to actually see the full results of active listings for an item, google is better than eBay's own in-house search, which may "hide" some of the results for *whatever reason. 

I'm not asking for testimony about the truthfulness of that, never mind theories on 'why.'  I am just curious about how google could possibly access listings hidden from regular home users of the in-house engine. 

[roccotacodad54]

   Yes Google will show completed and ended listings etc. but often I find what I'm looking for on an active listing I don't get on an Ebay search so going through the "dead" ones is sometimes worth it.

  Alot of the things I look for are uncommon to find so Google can be good for me in that regard.         Sometimes I find an item on another site altogether that I hadn't even heard of before.

[quicksilverdiecast]

I always use DDG or Google when searching, it is far more accurate, than getting everything in the kitchen drawer search engine.

[bennotbill]

It all comes down to the matter of timing. I'm sure ebay search does show me all the items, but showing me the cheaper ones after I bought one just doesn't work for me.

I need to find those before purchase. Using google first seems to go some way to achieving that. Of course it often points to items not on ebay which is fine by me, as this is ultimately down to ebay search failings.

[gurlcat]

Amazing reply, thanks ever so much for taking the time.  I will probably read it again to absorb all those excellent points. 

Couple of notes: 

(regarding sorting by lowest):  " I think in some situations, the filtering is clearly going wrong, such as when a search for postcards that turns up millions of results in most sorts turns up only a single page of results when sorted lowest fist. "  -For what it's worth, that's definitely not just an eBay thing.  I've noticed that Walmart is RIFE with that problem, drives me nuts. 

" Or the interaction of ad blockers and sponsored listings. "  -I ALWAYS forget about that factor.  I use ad blockers and have for years, so I have no idea what an eBay search looks like without it, LOL.  I just hate when Youtube videos get interrupted right in the middle of someone's sentence. 

[fbusoni]

@eburtonlab 

Not sure if you mentioned this, but I wonder about the effects on search performance of caching.

I'd imagine that eBay's cache is quite limited in duration... so an item that can be found at 9 am might not necessarily show up (readily anyway) at 9 pm.

Although it might well show up at 9 am the following day.

Admittedly, there are likely too many variables at play to know whether the cache is even a factor.

Also... I wonder if eBay uses a content delivery network, and if so, how that figures in to the dynamics here.

[eburtonlab]

I'd imagine that eBay's cache is quite limited in duration... so an item that can be found at 9 am might not necessarily show up (readily anyway) at 9 pm.

That is certainly possible, but I have not really noticed this.

Back when I was running the same bookmarked "newly listed" searches, day after day, I found the search results to be remarkably consistent, regardless of the time of day of the search.

I can think of a few possible technical reasons why results might vary between searches, particularly if the searcher was using a different eBay server that had a slightly different cache profile. Perhaps I am lucky to be in a location that is always using the same eBay server and others are not so lucky.

Part of the issue is that a lot of posts on the community pages about items that are missing from search are from sellers that may not be performing the exact same search from day to day. Defaults can change, different machines can have different settings, different locations, different ad blocker rules. A previous search may affect a search started from those search results without the user noticing. Searches may provide different results in different browsers because in one browser the user is signed in and using a specific location, while in the other browser the user is not signed in.

Some of the sellers noting that their sales follow certain patterns -- few or no sales for a while, then a flurry of sales, and then no sales again -- may be attributing the distribution of sales to eBay "hiding" the listing, when it may just be random chance, or else tied to something else entirely, such as a low-priced competitor being sold out during the period of high sales activity, before the competitor restocks and sales shift back to that competitor once again.

Back when vacation settings were tied to store subscriptions, more than one seller put a store on vacation and wound up ending all listings, taking an extended break from selling, and ultimately cancelling the store subscription. And then when the seller tried to start selling again, the seller found that none of the new active listings could be seen when searching -- because of hidden vacation settings that could not be accessed without a store subscription.

[gurlcat]

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@eburtonlab wrote:

Back when vacation settings were tied to store subscriptions, more than one seller put a store on vacation and wound up ending all listings, taking an extended break from selling, and ultimately cancelling the store subscription. And then when the seller tried to start selling again, the seller found that none of the new active listings could be seen when searching -- because of hidden vacation settings that could not be accessed without a store subscription.

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Ooof, what a nightmare, like a door that automatically closes and locks you out if you let go of the handle.  

As for the 'no sales ....flurry ... no sales' pattern thing, I could see that being due to competitors' behavior if you sold only within a pretty specialized category (say, 1960's-70's Dodge parts).  But often the people who claim the pattern is real and eBay-imposed have a much wider variety of items, so eBay would have to be imposing account-wide throttling on sellers to create that up/down sales pattern.  And if they did do that, wouldn't it be visible as a sharp dip in their impressions? 

I try to keep an open mind, but until I see some real evidence I think some people do try too hard to attach machinations to random chance.  Like you say, what would eBay's motivation be to throttle any portion of sellers at any given time (apart from Below Standard ones, of course)?