@hillbillymedia wrote:
My wife and I have our own desks and PC`s side by side. A few years back I was griping to her about ebay search. We experimented on our seperate accounts. We searched for identical items with identical keywords and no filters except "price+shipping lowest". We both have the same shipping address on file with ebay yet we were shown different search results each and everytime.
Okay, something I have in my research data that is not mainstream knowledge, is that eBay has changed how this works several times this year.
Prior to January of this year, if you searched an item you got the same results from different computers on the same IP. This would be one of the things I was showing in presentations with our listing team at the beginning of the year.
In the beginning of this year they changed what items come up in search (MPN was weighed less heavily). For example, prior to January, if we had an item with MPN "1234" and searched "1234", it would always have perfect matches of MPN first, followed by other product identifier matches (interchange part#, other part#, etc). What this meant in our eBay Motors category, was in 2017, your search typically resulted in "perfect matches" of the item you searched for, and then under the perfect matches you had "kits/sets" containing the item item.
Then in 2018, since MPN perfect matches were not being weighed as heavily, typically you seen KITS/SETS first, rather than single items.
In the spring update, eBay changed how this system works again. I first discovered this in the app. I was dragging down and noticed everything loaded completely different. Tried it on our PC's. At this time, EVERY TIME YOU SEARCHED resulted in different results.
Then sometime in April-May, they changed the system again. Now it seems that your search results "lock" to your browser, but it is NOT IP based. We can search on 3 different computers here and get 3 different results. But no matter how many times we load the page, it only shows the same items.
My point is, eBay is CONSTANTLY messing with the search algiorithm. They are doing complete shifts in how it works completely. This makes it extremely unreliable, and no wonder that there's major problems right now.
Now just consider how damaging it is that if you do many searches you ALWAYS see the same items, combined with errors in the system. If you search and get 50 bunk results, you are STUCK with those 50 results. No repeat searches will offer any changes.
Any sellers who are not getting exposure? Too bad. If the buyers didn't see you in their initial search, they won't see you now.
Even if you search a certain item, search ANOTHER item, then search the first item again. You will be stuck with the same results.
