Far too many internet markets now cornered by one or two big names sadly, consumer choice is becoming a thing of the past. A company only takes the customers choice away to become more profitable. If it was beneficial to USERS to not use a wildcard then, well, thats their choice to make. Removing the Wildcard is completely about making money, its not an IT issue for such a big company to run wildcard searches. Since this week I can’t see what items feedback was left for either, making it impossible to know if anybody has got the same item from a shop and had a bad experience with it… Hopefully thats a glitch. I don’t understand how eBay knows what a “best match” is either, another “feature” I truly hate. I can imagine them having a board meeting showing the figures for users doing wildcard searches and how much more money they could make if from now on every one of those searches was replaced by an average of 5 instead….ĮBay is slowly killing itself, hopefully soon something better will come along. Theories like they’re interested in additional data for mining imply that the management is competent, which isn’t likely in a big company.īy removing the wildcard feature, eBay forces users to do more searches and spend more time looking through listings, this results in them seeing more ads and more items, increasing potential revenue for eBay. The moral? Their most likely trying to spin a bad workaround for a fragile infrastructure as a feature. They were continually adding workarounds in the form of hand-crafted data to override the bad search results, which lead to even more problems when the hand-crafted data sets conflicted with each other, or with other search results. Or in other words, they already had a hammer… It’s basically now a pile of spaghetti code so convoluted that no one is able to predict how changes will affect search results, all because they weren’t smart enough to realize that a service optimized for type-ahead doesn’t make a good search engine. Well, the largest travel site in the world has a service whose “index” consists of several PatraciaTries, several hash tables some of them nested, and a growing collection of hacks and workarounds to implement its search engine. One more thing… for those who still want to do wildcard searches on eBay, just use Google Advanced Search, which does support wildcards - though only complete word wildcards (not partial words) - and limit the search to. I’m completely out of ideas why eBay would make this change that appears to be in the classic IT tradition of dealing with the bug by calling it a feature. In other words, the wildcard thing sounds like a user/business decision which I imagine you have far better conspiracy theories about than I.” Surely with a dev infrastructure like eBay has there’d be zero reason they couldn’t support wildcards effortlessly. Lucene is a popular out-of-the-box search engine (quite awesome actually) and supports wildcards just fine. “Sure, they’re more expensive” explained my geeky friend, “but not in some huge way (regex would be a different story). That was years ago and I had my doubts then, but why would eBay take an action like this that can only be intended to lower the load on their database?Īnother friend who knows a lot more about this than I do says wildcards don’t even add much to the database load. Yes, it probably is more accurate to list individually all possible permutations of a search term, but if they can be replaced nearly as well with a single asterisk, why make users do it the hard way?Ī friend of mine who used to work at eBay once claimed their IT infrastructure was so fragile that almost any feature change threatened the site purely through increased comment traffic. By removing the wildcard (*) advanced search functionality, we’re able to deliver search results more efficiently and faster.” And eBay’s reason for eliminating wildcard searches? “Our research showed that using specific terms to expand one’s search was a more effective method than wildcard searches, which oftentimes included unexpected variations that cluttered search results. It is (or rather was) easy to store wildcard searches on eBay as a powerful way of drilling down through millions of items as they are listed. EBay, the dominant auction site, this week took away from users the ability to search auction listings with wildcard keywords, which can be very useful to buyers looking for very specific part numbers or product series.
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