What are some of the problems of searching on eBay?
As experienced buyers know, there's huge variation in how items are titled, described, and priced. Different sellers may describe the same item differently:
- Synonyms may be used (e.g. a computer hard drive caddy may also be listed as a carrier, cart, holder, mount, or tray).
- Different abbreviations may be used (e.g. for new items – bn, nwt, nwot, nib, nip).
- Words may be spelled differently, or even misspelled.
- Different but equivalent size systems may be used (e.g. "40 Regular" and "Euro 50").
- The use of spaces may vary (e.g. 40R, “40 R”).
- Equivalent measures may be written (e.g. "half", "0.5", or "1/2").
- Parts may be listed as working for only a subset of the items that they are capable of working with (e.g. a docking station that's listed for a Dell Inspiron D800 may also happen to work for the Inspiron 8500 and 8600 models).
- In some cases, the sellers may not know how best to describe the items.
In such an environment, where item descriptions are seller-determined, it pays to be creative, comprehensive, and consistent with searching. It is advantageous to use synonyms, abbreviations, and other variations in the search queries as they may lead to auctions that few others will find.
However, such creative searching comes with a price. Once you start making multiple searches for the same or related items, you'll have to wade through multiple sets of results, which often may have many duplicates.
The search interface on eBay is flat in that one search yields one set of results. A flat interface works well where items are predictably indexed such as on Half.com or Amazon.com, but it's not ideal for noisy search environments like eBay. Flat searches also do not work well if you are looking for a range of things (e.g. a shopping list of items, or a list of alternatives) that span multiple searches.
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