eBay UK makes changes to Search

8/08/2008 at 14:44

eBay UK has announced two new features coming to Search in the next seven days. Search suggestions will guess at what buyers are trying to type as they type it: as Whirly put it earlier, if they’re looking for baths, they’ll be told to look for bath towels. I hated this when they brought it to .com, and I still hate it now. Giving buyers help if they’re not finding what they’re looking for is one thing: trying to second-guess them from the beginning of the finding process is a step too far. Let them look for what they’re here to buy before we start trying to distract them.

There will also be some unspecified changes to Refine Your Search, “to make it easier to find and select” additional search filters. I very much hope that they fix the BIN/SIF filter, where selecting “Buy It Now” greys out the “Shops items” box. Though filtering by BIN does appear to bring up results from SIF listings, you wouldn’t know it from the form’s behaviour: this is just confusing.

I don’t want this to turn into a rant on my own pet hates on the current search, but my other pet hate is the splitting up of things that should be together: for example, searching for a pair of jeans, I can refine my search by size/brand/category/price etc., and by selling format/location/distance from me etc. – but these two sets of options are in two different pop-up boxes. Why? If I want to refine my search, let me refine it as much as I like, all at one go.

eBay UK search results

eBay UK search results : click to embiggen

And if I’m searching for something that might show up in a bunch of different categories, the situation is even worse. Try a search for “dalek“: I have some categories from Toys, and some from Collectables, and I can choose to expand either of those lists – seperately – but if I’ve decided that actually what I want is a DVD, I’ve got to spot the “show all categories” list, and click that to bring up DVDs. On this particular search, there’s a rather helpful list of things other people searched for (which in fact includes my “dalek DVD”): what a shame they’ve buried it at the bottom of the page underneath an advert for Sky TV, and another advert for wheels on eBay Motors (relevence??).

I’ve been searching eBay for more than a decade now, and all this feels horribly clunky to me. What on earth can it be like for newbies? I really don’t want to join the ranks of sellers who start screaming and crying every time eBay change a font, but honestly, if this is the best they can do, I suggest that all their designers and developers are forced to actually use the site they’re messing with. Maybe then we’ll get something our buyers can use.