Today whil searching ebay for a specific Vintage snowmobile magazine I need to complete a set for my son I had a very intersting experience that lead to an eye opening observation light bulb moment about why buyers can not seem to find a lot of sellers items anymore.
To tell the truth I think a lot of potential buyers are giving up. I know I almost did before I got past the pages of garbage that had nothing to do with the keyword I was searching.
I was searching "snowmobiling" in books. Attached is a couple of screen shots of the page with the search information and the results.
The search results displayed a few items related to the the actual search term, but then there were results for hard parts and snowmobile accessories littered into the first 5 pages of the search. Items that absolutely NOTHING to do with "snowmobiling" books. There were googles, helmets, glasses, suits, etc.
At first I thought is was the usual siuation of sellers listing items in wrong categories. But it wasn't if you look at the end of the search string the category the item is listed in is a frake category created on the fly by ebays servers to pump unrelated items into the search results hoping to get more sales of **bleep**. Note the end of the string "See more Smith Pivot Helmet............."
I seriously believe this is severly hindering search for products, and I also think it violates ebays terms of service as well as their own search manipulation policies. By interested parties being fed a bunch of junk they don't want that cost more then the items they do want I think they just get discouraged and quit. By this ridiculous scam ebay is turning prospective buyers into phantoms of the listings.
