New EbayMotors Search Tutorial Thread in Category-Specific Boards in Community

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Re: New EbayMotors Search Tutorial Thread

Apr 20, 2009 3:13 AM

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hill4952 wrote:
search needs to be simple, you type in what your looking for, And it magically appears.

And theautoport wrote:
I would think the core site search should return the same results as motors and any other specialty sites eBay operates.

While I agree with you both in principle, I think you're seriously underestimating the challenge in that "magic" step. Especially when you're dealing with a tool that is being used by so many different types of people in so many different ways.

Take Henry's example. When someone searches for "78" from the Motors home page, it's a pretty safe bet they're referring to a year. But when they're searching from the eBay home page, they could mean anything (LP speed, HP ink cartridge number, etc). So do you apply the Motors-specific rule of translating all two digit numbers to years (which pisses off everyone who's not looking for a car related item) or only apply the year expansion when you know it's actually likely to be what the user means (which pisses off those who are)?

Even within the Motors category, guessing based on keyword isn't always reliable. One would think that you could always assume a four digit number like "2002" should be translated into the model year, right? Nope. Thanks to the folks at BMW, "2002" is actual a model name from the 70s as well as a year. But should you avoid treatinig 2002 as a year just to accomodate the folks looking for one obscure model, or should you make the assumption anyway to make the larger percentage of folks happy?

How about "wheel"? Surely anyone searching for "wheel" is looking for the Part Type: Wheel items, right? Tell that to the folks who were trying to find steering wheels and got sent to the wheels section instead.

In order for a search engine to "magically" present you with just the items you want, there's a certain amount of guess work involved. And while correct guesses will make people happy by getting them right to what they were looking for, incorrect guesses piss people off like nobody's business.

Improving the quality of those guesses relies on two fundamental things: figuring out what you're actually looking for, and knowing what every item on the site actually is. And trust me, neither of these are easy.

When you click on a category link or one of the search options in the sidebar, the search engine knows exactly what you mean, since it's built into the link. You may be clicking on "2002", but the link is really telling the search engine "Model Year = 2002". However, when you type something into a search box, the search engine just sees it as a string of letters and numbers that could mean anything, and is forced to guess. Sometimes the guesses are based on instructions a human has specifically entered into the system, sometimes it's based on statistics of what other people searching for the same thing have ended up doing, and sometimes it's just looking for any match of the same string, regardless of what it actually means. But no matter what the case, the guessing game always has a lot of potential for problems.

Of course, it's easier for us humans to type a few words into a search box than to click on a bunch of sidebar options. But that makes it that much harder for the search engine to know what we mean. So getting the "magic" to work smoothly on the context end is a very tricky balancing act between giving people a good user interface and giving the search engine the information it needs to make the best possible guess on which items to show.

And even if the search engine does know exactly what you're looking for, it's still not trivial to match that to the right inventory, because the same principles apply when the system tries to index an item. Ideally, the listing flow would provide form fields for every possible attribute of the item that someone might want to search on, and every seller would fill out every one of those fields. But it's impossible to determine every attribute that might be important to anyone, and getting sellers to fill out even a few attribute fields to better describe/index their items (much less dozens) is harder than you might think.

Just like on the search side of the equation, in the absence of computer-readable data provided by the seller, the system is forced to guess what every word in an item description really means and whether or not it's important. And unlike a search string that might be 1-10 words, an item description can be thousands of words long and that much more difficult for a computer to accurately index.

I'm not saying the new eBay Motors is perfect. It has a long way to go before it masters all of these problems well enough to work like magic. Even Google is far from close to perfecting this particular spell**, and they're dumping a frightening amount of money into the problem every year.

What I am saying is that the magic ain't easy. The folks on the Motors team (and on eBay's search team) have a phenomenally tough problem to tackle, and they're doing the best they can at it. I may not always agree with every choice they make, but there isn't a doubt in my mind that every one of them would give just about anything to give you the magic experience you're looking for.

That's why I think this thread is such a wonderful idea. Sure, it's great that the whole rest of the board is flooded with posts of frustration, suggestions and other feedback that the PTB can use to address all the aforementioned challenges. But this kind of "in the meantime, what's the best way to work with what we've got" mentality is really what's going to help buyers and sellers get the most out of the site while the bigger issues are figured out.

Sorry if I'm being a bit long-winded. But I find it's often easier to deal with a problem when you understand a bit more about what's going on under the hood, so I thought a little perspective on the "wacky technical reasons" I referred to earlier might be handy.

Anyway, hats off to Roblin for starting this thread. I think a lot of people (especially those who are new to the boards) will get a lot out of this thread - assuming we can keep true to Roblin's no-negs directive.

--ray

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
- Arthur C Clarke

** Let me clarify the Google point. If Google seems to make better guesses than eBay, it is because they are solving a much simpler problem. When you google something, it really only takes one halfway decent match somewhere near the top of the page to make you happy. It doesn't have to be the best option possible, just one that's good enough to satisfy your curiosity. But on eBay, your objective is to take every item on the site and narrow it down to just the one perfect item amongst millions to buy. That is a much, much harder problem to solve.

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