eBay

sakic92710 · ‎08-09-2023

I wanted to check out current & sold listings for a "Sports Special 1970-71 Hockey Bobby Orr." I searched eBay & found nothing. I went to Google & it showed me 1 currently active. I went back on eBay & tried a search again. Nothing. Those words match the beginning of the full title. Why don't I see it when I do a search? Stop giving excuses for eBay. If YOU do a search & find the listing, this also goes to the point MANY of us have been saying & that is not everyone can see every listing. I have a listing for a popular hockey set. Mine is the lowest price. After almost 3 weeks, it shows I have *1* view. The only ones priced lower are because they are in auction. How many buyers cannot even see my item in a search? Give me a break! Good luck to all. 🙂

wil_483592 · ‎08-09-2023

Purchased a book 2 weeks ago and did a search before buying, the search results showed it as the only one for sale. After I bought the book and after checkout it had the boxes/items below saying similar items and low and behold there were quite a a few for sale with the EXACT same title that were much cheaper. Mind you I searched it a few different ways and it always only showed the 1 result. My buying on eBay is at a small fraction of what it use to be.

ten_o_nine · ‎08-09-2023

Was the listing active on eBay?

sakic92710 · ‎08-09-2023

Sports Special 70-71 Hockey BOBBY ORR ED JOHNSTON BOBBY HULL (Dec 1970) Magazine | eBay

joels-retrocade · ‎08-09-2023

In this case I'm pretty sure it's because you put 1970-71 instead of 70-71. For some reason the search doesn't do partial matches in words. So for example if you search "card" no results will come back with the words "cards" because of the extra character "s". Something that needs fixing for sure, though I don't think they really care about matching the actual titles with the search criteria. They're only interest is to shove more promoted listings in front of your face.

luckythewinner · ‎08-09-2023

The search criteria you gave us was 1970-71 and the title has 70-71.

Google's search engine does not work exactly the same way as eBay's search engine. They are completely different companies.

By the way, I am not "defending eBay search". I am simply pointing out that Google and eBay use different technology for search.

sakic92710 · ‎08-09-2023

It did work under sports special 70-71. Yet, I did try just using the first 2 words & this is the top listing. LOL

Front & Rear Brake Rotors + Ceramic Brake Pads for 2014-2019 Nissan Rogue Sport | eBay

my-cottage-books-and-antiques · ‎08-09-2023

I searched: Sports Special magazine 1970-71 Hockey Bobby Orr

a copy for $5.99 Popped right up, and another copy for $25 was below, in the Results matching fewer words section..

I saw the same thing when doing the search using your words only, but that might be because the "algo" remembered the previous result.

Going to the $25 copy , and looking around in the much despised PL modules, I found even more copies , at varying price points.

I'm not going to spend anytime digging through different listings for their item specifics etc to try to explain these results. Just stating the results that I found.

a-lotta-stuff · ‎08-09-2023

Both searches on ebay - the main one and the one on the item for sale by ... page - don't work like anyone would hope they would - you know correctly. They work ebay correctly.

OK defenders, defend this:

Looking for anything from 'this' radio station. Left search set for all categories and typed in just the call letters - KWOW - and got eight things of which the top six were 'correct'- all from same seller.

BUT at the bottom under 'Results matching fewer words' there was two more from that seller.

THEN pulled up an 'items for sale' page for the seller. Tried to see how many they really had for sale, so again typed in kwow in the search box that should just search that page, and it fills in items on the drop down list that's not connected to the search or even for sale by the seller who's page it is. And if that's not good enough that search doesn't even have a search button or in this case an icon [looking glass] that works! - All that search is good for is to click on something on the list and be take off that page and shown other sellers items.

So I hand count - it showing the same eight as the main search. The two under 'Results matching fewer words' aren't shown on the seller's own items for sale page. .

So contact seller. Tell them what I found/saw/see. Sent them the photos. They say there are TEN from that station up right now. Other then on their active page, THEY can't find the other two either.

To me that's not the way search should work.

Fun thing about the just 'kwow' search - other two listings were posters with promoted copies shown below the real listings - so the seller paid to have them at the end of the list, right?

retro_entertainment_collectibles · ‎08-09-2023

@sakic92710 wrote:
I wanted to check out current & sold listings for a "Sports Special 1970-71 Hockey Bobby Orr." I searched eBay & found nothing. I went to Google & it showed me 1 currently active. I went back on eBay & tried a search again. Nothing. Those words match the beginning of the full title. Why don't I see it when I do a search? Stop giving excuses for eBay. If YOU do a search & find the listing, this also goes to the point MANY of us have been saying & that is not everyone can see every listing. I have a listing for a popular hockey set. Mine is the lowest price. After almost 3 weeks, it shows I have *1* view. The only ones priced lower are because they are in auction. How many buyers cannot even see my item in a search? Give me a break! Good luck to all. 🙂

Not defending but as a software engineer I can tell you Google or other external search engines have no bearing whatsoever on how eBay's functions. There exist several ways to submit content to Google for example as well as Google's own spiders (bots) which can scrape data or gather via certain meta data. These bots and how Google will index is 100% different than sites spidered of submitting tend to and you're listing might show now but may filter off with external sites. There may be 1000 listings of some item yet in a google search only "n" appear, this another advantage of say Amazon whereby there exists a listing page with multiple offers. eCommerce content from known sites will be handled quite differently than say some blog site.

How search engines for enterprise sites operate are among the closest guarded code/IT infrastructure secrets that exist.