Search Function... What the heck!

[chaddilacdesignsig]

Dear eBay! your search function sucks!!!! 

When I search a specific item you show me all the stuff Im not interested in, so the keywords I type in are for no reason!! It's 2022 get with the program!!!

[samanthasb0utique]

Haha! Thank you!

[pjcdn2005]

She will still needs specifics.  Just tagging her and saying search doesn't work right isn't going to help her know what is wrong.

[2011jleach31]

I think that is her point, no search function should be that terrible and difficult to use. It should not require a paragraph to tell someone how to search. 

[inhawaii]

What are you looking for?

What are you searching for?

[steve_stuff]

I'm the guy who did the photo - as I just wanted to see if it sold on ebay [no] it went to our real store, the one with wood shelves and no shipping - well we sometimes ship.

[pjcdn2005]

I'm not disagreeing but telling a rep that it is too complicated isn't going to accomplish anything.  They need to give specifics of what happened when they were searching.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@steve_stuff wrote:

I'm the guy who did the photo - as I just wanted to see if it sold on ebay [no] it went to our real store, the one with wood shelves and no shipping - well we sometimes ship.

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I had one like that a few weeks ago & posted it here.  Said 0 found for what I had searched & so they changed my search criteria, even tho' it was correct, BUT the first 7 items were ACTUAL MATCHES to what I had searched, even tho' it said 0 found.   

I posted it here along with screen shots & velvet@ebay  did have Tech look into it & of course by the time they did, it worked fine.  Sure enough, she tagged me again on that day to test it & it worked fine for me by then too :-(.   

So @chaddilacdesignsig  @steve_stuff if you do post screen shots & tag her, she will get it looked into.  But when it's not re-creatable, it's hard.  

I agree that search is really buggy & although I know what I can do to get more accurate results, the problem with that is that many buyers are not search experts, nor should they need to be!  Also, as a buyer, why should they have the patience to deal with it, when there's other places they can easily buy?  That's where the problem is.  

[eburtonlab]

I agree that search is really buggy & although I know what I can do to get more accurate results, the problem with that is that many buyers are not search experts, nor should they need to be! Also, as a buyer, why should they have the patience to deal with it, when there's other places they can easily buy?

Buyers do not need to be experts in searching to get some results. To the contrary, many of these issues are likely a direct result of eBay trying to provide better, more intuitive results for less than entirely well-conceived searches.

eBay wants to encourage sales above all things. If eBay thinks altering search results in a particular way will encourage more sales that it ultimately discourages, then eBay is very likely to alter those results in that way. Even if that leads to problems for some users, as long as those trade-off calculations make sense, eBay will always opt for more sales over less sales.

The more complicated those exceptions and alterations are, the more likely there are to be unintended consequences and problems with some subset of searches. And users that do want logically consistent and complete search results will have to take extra steps to work around eBay's "intuitive" search features.

That also means that sellers that want their items to have the most likelihood of appearing in their potential buyers' searches will have to understand more about how eBay's searches work than their buyers need to in order to take advantage of how those searches actually work.

[velvet@ebay]

Hi all! Since the OP didn't give an example, I went with @steve_stuff's and searched for thomas humber in the Books & Magazines category. My results were similar to theirs (screen shot below). If you come across a search that's not working and can provide screen shots, URL's, etc. then I'd be happy to pass the info on to the tech team. As was mentioned here already, it's hard to find a solution to something that we can't recreate. 

[steve_stuff]

steve stuff here - 

First of all, thank you for responding  - As our photo is real, no photo shop, and your page doesn't have the 'glitch' that mine did, most likely it's because it was a one time thing - at least for us.