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Good Evening all,
First let me say thank you all for the thoughtful comments about the new search.
Our intention of getting the new designs, categories, classification, etc. 'out there' as early as possible was to have a conversation with everyone about what the right things are to do in the area's we've rolled out, e.g. which of these features are working, how can they be improved, and in what categories or queries. I've feared that instead of sparking a meaningful dialog on user experience, taxonomy & classification, that we had spun hopelessly into the land of angry 'Where is my COMPLETED ITEMS!!!? threads for features we're building but haven't finished yet. In any case, I'm thrilled that we're here now and I hope we can keep this up. I'll agree that we could have done a better job communicating what was done and what was coming to alleviate the pain here. I'll take responsibility for that.
A couple of clarifying comments: My team's job is not to launch the new search. We're focused on improving the buyer experience to make shopping/browsing/finding on eBay more fun, more relevant, more compelling. We measure success by quantitative measures such as buyer engagement (Searches, View Items, Watches), Bids/Bins per user session, Bids/Bins per user per week, month, repeat visits, etc. We also measure qualitative 'fun', easy, relevant, etc. And we do measure these metrics by category as well. (e.g. selling more cell phones and less collectibles isn't' going to be success for us) There are tens of millions of visits to the site per day, 250 million searches across 28 million unique keywords per day. Too many users are coming to the site today and leaving without finding what they're looking for, even when it's there. if we didn't believe that we could significantly improve the finding experience by all measures.
Re: Collectibles,
I hope it goes without saying that collectibles and auctions are still the heart of eBay and considered by everyone to be critical for our short and long term success. If not I'll say it. Our favorite eBay stories are about the collectible, unique, the weird and wonderful. (BTW, did you see the guy who found his baby book on eBay recently? incredible) I particularly liked menagerie1's post on collectibles & fun, because it reflects a lot of the sentiment of eBay in general about how important this area is to the company... As several of you also point out, its an incredibly hard area to 'classify' with the right categories/attributes, etc. To some extent this category alone demonstrates several weaknesses in the existing single dimension category structure and item specifics. For sure, eBay has no hope of creating and publishing all the right categories and item specifics to satisfy every Collectibles buyer and seller.
So Naugagirl, I'm not suggesting that categories aren't very relevant for areas like collectibles, only that item specifics are very relevant for these other 'commodities' areas. I'll agree with naugagirl and others that the new search doesn't go far enough to improve Collectibles. We'll continue to work on improving the category structure here until we have a better solution.
To this end, next week we're launching something really exciting (for those of you that find taxonomy exciting) called "Custom item specifics" The product will allow sellers to specify their own custom item specifics (the names and values) instead of relying on eBay to provide the structure for items. The idea here is that sellers know their items best, (I'm hearing a collective 'no duh' right now) and that eventually these seller specified attributes will get indexed in search and drive the site navigation/refinement. When we launch this next week we'll post a thread here and I'd love to hear your feedback on how you think it will impact today's search and Finding 2.0. We think this is a huge step towards turning over classification to the community. So in terms of investing in Collectibles, this is a huge part of the strategy.. and it's not tied soley to the new finding experience we're testing right now. Sellers and buyers can benefit from this new capability in both the old experience and the new experience.
Also, new search does not rely entirely on item specifics to be functional. Admittedly the structured data found in the categories with good item specifics improve the new experience dramatically. We're pretty happy with how this is performing in places like ipods, cell phones, etc (so called 'commodities' in this thread). As menagerie1 also points out in his 'disclaimer' its important to have a relevant experience across each of the categories such that users engage, buy and return to find everyone else's items. More ipods, cell phones, socks and air compressors sales = more postcards and antique button sales. (and vice versa)
Rockboss2000,
Regarding the search terms. "Removing" the search terms from the search box and displaying those in the aspect navigation is part of the experiment... The intention is to represent all of your search terms in one place in the experience so you can more easily see what's shaping your results. This also encourages refinement using the navigation rather than adding more search terms, which should lead to more relevant results.
Also, your screenshots show 3 different iterations that would be exposed to separate groups, it would potentially be confusing for users to see each of these in a single session, however a user will only see one of these for all of their sessions. We're now testing only versions of the new experience that have performed well for buyers and sellers.
enough for now, sorry for the long post & thanks again all for the great feedback!
Jeff & the Finding team
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