Hello Everyone!

We just wanted to take a moment to let you know that beginning this week, we will be directing more traffic to the New Search Experience.

Based on your input, we have made some key changes since we initially introduced the New Search Experience back in May, including:

• Updating the look & feel so that you can expand and collapse modules on the left side of the page.
  
• Making Preferences even easier to find in the left side of the page.
  
• Re-integrating the tabs to filter by BIN & Auction only
  
• Including Store items in the BIN Tab and BIN filters

Information on the new search experience in general
Why are we introducing a new search?
The new search is intended to make it easier for buyers to find the things they love. We want a more engaging, dynamic experience that is fundamentally driven by buyers.

We've focused on three major areas:

• Recall –improving which items are returned in a search
  
• Navigation - helping buyers expand and narrow a search to make it easier to find just the right item
  
• Relevance - making the entire experience more relevant for each individual search event. This includes using the right recall and navigation for the search, but also in sorting the most relevant items

To Improve Recall
In the new experience, we expand the items returned in search (recall), by including item specifics, categories in addition to the item’s title, to show more of the items a buyer is looking for (Sellers: this is why using Item Specifics is so important!)

Try comparing a search for a few of these keywords on the old and new search and you’ll see what we mean.

• size xxl sweatshirt
  
• nwt dress size 8
  
• birthstone for january
  
• widescreen tv
  
• shawshank redemption widescreen dvd
  
• left handed clubs

To Make Navigation / Refinement Easier

There are more than 125 million items on eBay today and still growing! The new search experience makes finding what you want in this incredible abundance even easier. Whether you know exactly what you want and need to refine right down to it, or want to browse and be inspired by the unmatched selection from the worlds most diverse marketplace. We’re also focused on providing the best experience in each category, so you may have visual experiences in some categories where pictures are especially important to buyers, such as Clothing, Shoes & Accessories, Jewelry, and Art and more ‘productized’ experiences in Books and movies

Relevance: to let the community of sellers and especially buyers drive the experience.

The new finding platform is fundamentally built to be driven by the activity of buyers and sellers. For example:
Sellers define and select item specifics that improve search recall and drive the site navigation. Buyers who use navigation based on these then ‘vote’ with every purchase, which also ranks the importance of item specifics and other navigation elements. Some of our tools, such as Search auto-complete and related searches, also aggregate successful buyer activity and provide it to other people searching on the site to help them refine their queries, or discover new potential areas of interest.

Best Match uses buyer activity to rank items. Items that buyers buy more often will get higher rankings in search. For Fixed Price listings, item relevance and detailed seller ratings will continue to be important factors in Best Match, but instead of Time Ending Soonest, the focus will be more on total cost (price plus shipping) and recent sales history, favoring items that are selling the fastest. For Auction-style listings, item relevance, detailed seller ratings and time ending soonest will continue to be the most important factors in Best Match search results.

For more information on how to promote your fixed price listings please look at the FAQs here:

Providing feedback:

Should you opt-in or get directed to the new experience, we would like to thank you in advance for your feedback. You can continue share your likes & dislikes with us by posting here.

Thank you so much for taking the time to let us know how you feel, & for giving us great direction in improving search on the site.

You can read more about the Playground and the New Search Experience in Jeff King’s Announcement

Regards,

eBay Finding Team
PS We will be offering Office Hours & a Workshop in the coming weeks to answer your questions, comments & concerns. We will announcing the dates & times soon.