More tests on new search results
30/07/2007 at 14:27
eBay UK have made another announcement about tests for changes to search results on the site. Beginning this week, until the beginning of September, 2% of users will be shown the new pages, which are designed to return more items for each search, and at the same time, to return only relevent results.
From the example given, “size 12 red shoes”, it seems that item specifics may be being looked at as well as just titles, so sellers should be even keener to keep those fully filled out. What’s not quite clear, however, is how these tests relate to the tests already announced at the beginning of July, which we think we’ve already seen.
If you’re one of the lucky ones to see the new results, please grab us a screen shot and mail it over (remove REMOVE): we’d love to see what’s in store!
Allotment says
7:11 pm on 30/07/2007
Hello Sue,
If you visit the eBay Playground site you can get a feeling for how the new search might look. It’s the usual ebay site with a candidate test search enabled (to the top of the page you’ll see “You’re on the Playground” as a reminder). It’s item specifics based but also does stuff with certain keywords. For example a search for French will also return items keyworded with synonyms of the word such as ‘France’, a colour specification will sometimes pick up close match colours, and so on. There doesn’t seem to be an ‘advanced’ search facility, though I guess that is simply a limitation of the test environment. The keyword and item specifics nature of the search gives a result set that crosses the old style categories
I’ve also found that if you take the whirlpool baths search result page from your July 27th article as a start point and begin a new search from there that your results seem to be displayed using that test search system. You can aslo navigate back from that shops oriented result page to auction listings searches in the new format. Obviously it’s not clear if this new search is the 2% of users trial being launched at the moment……….
Searching my own category (I sell Edwardian Postcards) provides some good results and some that worry For example a search for postcard auction items using the keywords ‘Marie Studholme’ (she was a musical stage star) gives me a good 11 results, two of which have been listed in the wrong category and that might otherwise have been missed. However some other searches left me confused and not being able to refine or limit searches to a broad category seeming to be the main problem. Similarly the body text of auctions seem to count for little if anything, a search of postcard auctions using a keyword that is in the body text of many of my auctions provides zero results, the same search on the live search system returns those auctions.
Linda