Search engine an epic fail!

[goldrushfinds]

I was in the process of listing a Men's vest, with the brand being "The Territory Ahead". I wanted to see all the active and sold listings of used vests to determine a fair price and view the sell thru rate. So I typed in the search bar precisely "Mens The Territory Ahead Vest". What did I get, well approx. 2/3 of the listings were for Jackets/Coats, none of which had the word "vest" anywhere in the title. I tried to put quotation marks around the word "vest", but that eliminated almost all the listings, including many of the vest. I was told by customer support that the vest category  has been eliminated and is now lumped in with Coats & Jackets. Even the default sort of "Best Match" was largely ineffective, as the first 9 listings were vests, but after that it was a mixture of jackets and vests in no particular order. This is just plain incompetence and is inexcusable. I mean how hard can it be to program the search to just return relative search terms and not irrelevant items. If I were a buyer I would give up and go elsewhere, rather than sort through all the jumble of listings. 

[pjcdn2005]

 It is silly that a search for vests would include jackets.  I tried using your search terms and added '-jacket'. That resulted in seeing only vests however, it only showed a percentage of the vests, not all of them.

[rixstuff]

Yep vests are now called sleeveless sweaters or sleeveless jackets.  Sigh.

[coolections]

Even though there was 50% jackets and 50% vests when I did a search, it was still easy to see the pictures of all the vests. With that said, if it bugs you that bay shows both, you can go to the upper right corner and click "advanced  search". From there you can eliminate all the coats by typing "coat" in the line that says skip that word.

[eburtonlab]

@goldrushfinds 

Here is my attempt at your original search, with a couple of tweaks:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%22Territory+Ahead%22+%28vest%2Csleeveless%29+%28men%...

The reason that putting "vest" in quotes eliminated so many results is that once you include any word in quotes, you lose all other keyword substitutes as well, so only results with the exact keywords are returned. So if a seller used the word "men" instead of "mens", or left out the "the" in "the territory ahead", those results would no longer appear in your search.

Any time you use quotes or exclusions, you lose your "smart" search expansion features -- "keyword substitution" and "implicit category navigation" -- which can come in handy when you want to search all categories and not be shunted into a particular category.

To get around that you can specify some common substitutions yourself, such as (men,mens) or (vest,sleeveless).

[goldrushfinds]

"Here is my attempt at your original search, with a couple of tweaks:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%22Territory+Ahead%22+%28vest%2Csleeveless%29+%28men%...

The reason that putting "vest" in quotes eliminated so many results is that once you include any word in quotes, you lose all other keyword substitutes as well, so only results with the exact keywords are returned. So if a seller used the word "men" instead of "mens", or left out the "the" in "the territory ahead", those results would no longer appear in your search.

Any time you use quotes or exclusions, you lose your "smart" search expansion features -- "keyword substitution" and "implicit category navigation" -- which can come in handy when you want to search all categories and not be shunted into a particular category.

To get around that you can specify some common substitutions yourself, such as (men,mens) or (vest,sleeveless)."

Thanks for your efforts, but to me that is unacceptable. Are we to presume that the average potential buyer is going to jump through all those hoops to find what they want. Very few people are going to know how to tweak the search as you did to come up with what they are looking for. 

[goldrushfinds]

"Even though there was 50% jackets and 50% vests when I did a search, it was still easy to see the pictures of all the vests. With that said, if it bugs you that bay shows both, you can go to the upper right corner and click "advanced search". From there you can eliminate all the coats by typing "coat" in the line that says skip that word."


Yeah, and about 1% of potential buyers are going to know to do that to narrow the results to return what they were actually looking for.

[eburtonlab]

@goldrushfinds 

Thanks for your efforts, but to me that is unacceptable. Are we to presume that the average potential buyer is going to jump through all those hoops to find what they want. Very few people are going to know how to tweak the search as you did to come up with what they are looking for.

The "average potential buyer" does not really care about finding every possible instance of an item in a search. The average buyer just wants to type a few keywords into the search and get some results -- which is what usually happens, for the most part.

That means that users that want to use search results to do research on prices will have to learn some search syntax to get around the Fisher Price default behavior. And sellers will have to take the "smart" search into account when deciding in which categories to list their items, or risk having their items not be seen by "average potential buyers".

That certainly would be easier if eBay would keep the help pages up to date so the rules were clearly spelled out, though.

[goldrushfinds]

Well from what I can gather from your comments, it just means that Ebay is not a user friendly site. It also means as a seller, that I have to keep tweaking my listings in order to be seen (at least by most potential buyers). They (Ebay) can do better!

[coolections]

@goldrushfinds 

Maybe 1% of those who have not shopped on line for the last 10 years or so.

[johnrj1226]

Cassini  (eBay primary search engine since 2013) did it.  Been a mess ever since.

[esg-enterprises]

Wait until you get replies from the usual suspects on how well the search engine works by just completing a simple 18 steps that I'm sure all who casually search the site are more than willing to do. 

In the meantime I have had 3 CSR's tell me in the past 2 weeks the search is major problem and they are aware that something has to be done, and ebay is supposedly trying to figure what to do next.   

[ifyouloveit]

Search is a mess and the casual holiday buyer is NOT going to take all the steps suggested to find what they want.

They will go elsewhere. Time is money and in many cases, the easiest and fastest site is going to win the $$$.

Right now search is not the easiest, it's getting worse. I've stopped buying.

[mr_lincoln]

@goldrushfinds   It makes no sense and ... when I ask my wife to grab my insulated vest I don't say, "hey Honey, can you please grab my sleeveless jacket from the closet?"

[esg-enterprises]

You are right.

I have posted many times on these boards, myself and many of my friends and relatives practically no longer buy on ebay anymore.

My father and I used to have ebay packages delivered almost daily, he hasn't purchased on ebay in 8-10 months at least.

I recently tried searching for a vintage car part I need, even after filtering used, I got 6 pages of the exact same new item, same stock photo, all with similar titles that said "fits 63 Impala".

I closed the window and forgot about it. 

This coupled with many good long time sellers leaving is not good.