Very poor search results lately. Sales are down also. Why are search results incorrect?

[oldedale]

Searched for Driving hat. Made by Kraft Mfg. Search terms were - Driving hat Kraft. EBay suggest automobile parts, 10 listings. After scrolling down 1 1/2 pages I see driving hats. Why is this search result so bad? We add By --Driving hat BY Kraft and get hits on hats. What's up with search engine? Glitches again?

[robot-hands]

Searches are bad because ebay share holders get rewarded at the expense of ebay users.

There is no financial incentive for you to find a thing....only that you spend money.

Normally it would be reason that you would want to spend money on the thing you want.

No so for a giant slow moving money machine made of algorithms.

[swenson8781]

It's too bad, but they are really incorrect and poor.  Searches now, apparently, are driven by what the computer system 'thinks' you want to see, and 75% of the time, gets it wrong.  It's a computer, what can one expect?

Once upon a time, back in the good old days, one could type words in the search bar, and anything that had those EXACT words would come up.  There were usually a lot of items, so one would have to scroll, but buyers also learned to add more descriptive words to their searches to narrow it down.  Most sellers learned the same, and added descritpive words to their titles, so the buyers could find the sellers.  

Ironically, buyers/people, CAN & DO learn how to find what they are looking for.  But computers/algorithyms are limited, and cannot truly think abstractly, thus incapable of adapting as well a human would.   It's too bad that businesses put their faith in computers, rather than us. So what that equals, is computers guessing at what YOU want, based on your previous searches, or very few, limited words.  Sorry.

[futuretomorrow]

@oldedale

That's a bad search query combined with a poor system search algorithm which equals the results you received. A "Driving hat" is also known as a "Driving Cap", "Ivy hat", "Cabbie hat", "Gatsby hat", "Irish hat" and "Newsbot hat". 

I searched for "driving hat" and received 18,860 results, all of which seem to be hats only. Then I scrolled down and on the left sidebar, under the "brands" filter, looked for Kraft. eBay has no such brand tagged or listed with that keyword or manufacturer. I then searched elsewhere and the brand is so small or unknown (at least based on the search results) that the 4th result was the manufacturer themselves.

I'll let everyone guess which company occupied the 2nd and 3rd result. 

[v7bbn_0]

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@swenson8781 wrote:

It's too bad, but they are really incorrect and poor.  Searches now, apparently, are driven by what the computer system 'thinks' you want to see, and 75% of the time, gets it wrong.  It's a computer, what can one expect?

Once upon a time, back in the good old days, one could type words in the search bar, and anything that had those EXACT words would come up.  There were usually a lot of items, so one would have to scroll, but buyers also learned to add more descriptive words to their searches to narrow it down.  Most sellers learned the same, and added descritpive words to their titles, so the buyers could find the sellers.  

Ironically, buyers/people, CAN & DO learn how to find what they are looking for.  But computers/algorithyms are limited, and cannot truly think abstractly, thus incapable of adapting as well a human would.   It's too bad that businesses put their faith in computers, rather than us. So what that equals, is computers guessing at what YOU want, based on your previous searches, or very few, limited words.  Sorry.

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Don't forget how certain prolific sellers then learned how to spam the search engine and buyers would get page after page of '99 cent cell phone protector screens' or some other such garbage filled results, too.

So ebay's programmers came up with this solution, and now folks think they are to blame...

The answer however, would be to stop spamming the engine.