alexiskai
Well-known member
Kind of off topic, but is there a good way to search on eBay now without getting results that are 95% (or higher) totally unrelated? Searching in titles only seems to no longer do just that, and seller after seller put hundreds (or thousands) of totally unrelated words in their descriptions that end up getting used in a search. Very frustrating. Any methods around all this would be greatly appreciated.
I usually get results relevant to my search in the first 1-2 pages. My guess is that eBay thinks buyers don't always have a good sense of how sellers are describing the thing they want to buy, so it shows you items that are only loosely related to your search terms in case you are bad at searching. It's a good bet the vast majority of their users are in fact bad at searching, so from their perspective this is a good strategy.
Another factor may be that you might be searching for items that just don't get listed much. I have a few saved searches for obscure parts, and if I don't put the part number in quotes, I will get a lot of false positive hits. The actual part might get listed only a few times a year. If you're running searches and there just are very few hits to show you, most of what you see will be unrelated.