eBay ditch wildcard

[TWINSET]

For those that missed the announcement, eBay have ditched wildcard searching - adding an asterisk now messes up your search!

From now on, you'll have to miss out on Mounteneers, Mountainears, Mountys etc. because one can't search for Mount* - the search has to be for Tamiya (Mounteneer, Mountaineear, Mounty, Mountie, Mountaineer) etc

Not sure why this is considered a move forward, but there ya go.

They're promoting their new search system as being infallible, but 'Mountaineer' now returns 191,757 reuslts including

37 J Arthur Dixon RP postcards - Scotland - Castles, Mountains, Lochs etc

Me To You Bear My Blue Nose Friends Plush Duck Antelope Swan Squirrel Beaver

Apple Macbook Pro 17" (2007model) 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, Mountain Lion

Searching for "mountaineer" including the " " results in items only including mountaineer but when one deliberately misspells mounteneer for hidden bargains, their system corrects it to Mountaineer.

Happy days

[Gruntfuggly]

I never knew you could use wildcards!

...and now I will never be able to...

[OCD]

Well, most people didn't know of wildcard searches because eBay has deliberately suppressed this 'common' knowledge for years. EBay started off as a purely Boolean database search, which was a well enough established protocol that most users (buyers) could just pick up and use it without reading through tutorials or whatever. Then, when eBay started losing ground to the new giants like Amazon and Google, they had to find a way to make themselves more profitable and relevant.

This is when they began the manipulation of search results, rotation of visibility, and my favorite thing ever: Best Match. Seizing on the fact that many of the 'new' users were unaware or unfamiliar of this Boolean 'standard', eBay defaulted the incoming search for newcomers to return listing results of the variety and order that were based on predictions made by their Best Match algorithm! Of course this was mostly a disaster for them because let's face it, eBay isn't Google or Amazon, and if you really wanted an Amazon-type experience, why not just go there? EBay went out of their way to attract buyers that were ultimately buying from somewhere else, and the rest of us got swept under the collectibles rug.

Now after years of idly watching eBay become internet history, they've actually renewed their effort to make search more like eBay's perceived competitors by rolling out another new search: Cassini.

"Right now, when you search for an item on eBay, you may get tens of thousands of results. eBay will be limiting search results to a fraction (hundreds) of what it returns today."

I realise that taken at face value, this above quote seems like a positive move, as most agree that searching through ten of thousands of listings individually is not an activity that we have time for. What is not mentioned here is that eBay already has a system in place to relevantly drill down the results, and gives you complete control over doing so: The good ol' Boolean search. They can't force us to use this absurd 'predictive' search nonsense unless all other alternatives have been eliminated. TL;DR: Dumping the asterisk is only the beginning. Its elimination is a move forward because eBay believes that they know what you want better than you do.

[atf300]

poop

[backtomyroots]

Ebay, always improving.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. not.

[Incredible_Serious]

Put this one right up there with eBay sending me e-mails of 'items you might like'... taken straight from my eBay item browsing history.

Need to reinstate the wildcard search to see if they can find the plot....

Alex

[CoolHands]

no surprise unfortunately. I seem to find that even with quote marks, it gives me **** that dosen't have my quoted search term! It takes no notice eg if I search "gsxr1000k8" (no spaces) it will return results consisting of "gsxr 1000 k8" (their spaces). They can't know what exactly I'm wanting. Common sense out the window, again.

[TWINSET]

Yup, the search function's about as much use as Amazon's now.

It's even worse for excluding words - I been looking for an iPhone stand that doesn't stick to a windscreen, and used to have -wind* to exclude windscreen, windshield, window, windows, windscreens and windshields, but now I gotta type all the permutations in manually for the first search.