Late last year, we added search expansions in several Business & Industrial categories to help buyers find more of the items they're interested in. Starting this week, we’re going to add more expansions to other areas of the site, gradually increasing over the next few months.
What Are Search Expansions?
Many buyers who aren’t as familiar with searching on eBay will often type in a general description of what they are looking for into the search box (for instance, action figure). When this happens, the results they get are often only a portion of the relevant listings, because many of them will not have action figure in the title.
With search expansions, when someone uses the search box to find a particular type of item, we’ll display those listings that have the keyword in the title as usual, but we’ll also show all items in a relevant category that we’ve mapped to the keyword. So, for instance, in our example the search results would show all items with action figure in the title, as well as all items in the Action Figures category. Or, if the buyer types in Superman action figure, we’ll show all listings with Superman action figure in the title, as well as all listings with Superman in the title that are in the Action Figures category.
If you don’t want to have the expanded results shown, simply use quotation marks around any single keyword in your search terms (for example: “Superman” action figure). To let us know your thoughts on these changes, please comment below on this thread.
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