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. 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. No more. 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. By removing the wildcard (*) advanced search functionality, we’re able to deliver search results more efficiently and faster.”
Yeah, right.
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?
I smell a rat.
A 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. 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?
Another friend who knows a lot more about this than I do says wildcards don’t even add much to the database load. “Sure, they’re more expensive” explained my geeky friend, “but not in some huge way (regex would be a different story). Lucene is a popular out-of-the-box search engine (quite awesome actually) and supports wildcards just fine. Surely with a dev infrastructure like eBay has there’d be zero reason they couldn’t support wildcards effortlessly. In other words, the wildcard thing sounds like a user/business decision which I imagine you have far better conspiracy theories about than I.”
Nope. 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.
What do you think is up?
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 ebay.com.
Sounds like something Apple would do. First, remove the feature because “We know what they really want, even if they don’t”. Then call the removal of the feature a new feature. If it wasn’t so frustrating it would be hilarious.
“We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”
When Apple drops a feature, the benefit at least to Apple is always pretty clear.
eBay is really not such a paragon that it merits dragging Apple, Google, or Amazon into the conversation as diversion. Frankly all three of those (and Apple most of all) have customer service chops all over eBay’s sorry record.
The sad likelihood is that this is a bureaucracy-induced change that inconveniences eBay’s power users without providing any tangible advantage whatever to eBay.
Let’s be fair, Microsoft pulls this too with every Windows release.
This makes absolutely no sense. You’d think that wildcards would help hook up buyers and sellers, but it seems that 2+2=5 these days.
Overstock must be doing cartwheels.
Maybe they were the target of a DDOS attack where by thousands of zombie PCs were searching for *
Hanlon’s Razor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
This appears to be the new fashion in IT … reduce every product and service to an empty feature set and claim it benefits the users.
eBay has been accused of lots of things, but competence isn’t one of them.
I think they are looking for an additional fee based feature for the site. The ability to find like objects that they could charge the seller, or buyer, or both for. This way they create an additional market they control to make it easier to search, instead of your ability to simply use a wild card. Many people may not have even known about the wild card option, considering most users are just that users.
Interesting that they also have their opt-out deadline for class-action lawsuits around this time, might lead a conspiracy theory to be that they knew what they were doing, needed the legal protection in, and are now changing to have some feature introduction, and they will be protected from class action lawsuits.
I do not believe in the conspiracy theory, but who knows why silly changes like this are made.
Advanced buyers used wildcard searches to find misspelled items. These items, because they didn’t show up in a regular correctly spelled search, typically went for well below normal auction values.
Without wildcards, most misspelled items will get zero bids. This leads the seller to relist the item with proper spelling – meaning more listing fees, higher auction prices, and higher commissions for ebay and paypal.
I got a duel pentuim desktop once pretty cheap.
You are probably correct, though why doesn’t eBay just say that, or a somewhat sanitized version? And it’s still a disservice to users.
And why keep it in the advanced search?
Better yet why does ebay not just fix it? Seems pretty strait forward to spell check the listing titles and ask the seller “did you mean?” they way Google does on searches. Yes you might need to data mine out some product names and other common key words from existing listings in addition to a COTS spelling dictionary but really the problem seems pretty strait forward.
I like your original theory better that its a database issue.
Think of all the computing power it would take to correct “strait forward”
What Ben says …
I’m sure there are going to be a few people who won’t like what I’m about to disclose, but the removal of wildcards was less about server load and more about data mining. Why allow people to search for an ambiguous “Floral silk scar*” when “Floral silk (scarf, scarfs, scarves)” will net you much more minable search data? This data will be used alongside all the other data eBay already collects (especially watchlists, but also the other search data) for eBay’s so-called “Best Match” search ranking system.
In response to all of those discussing database wildcards and simple Btree indexing, I would hope that Ebay is using something better than simple string construction passed into the database through bind variables. For example, if they’re using Oracle, the descriptions should be indexed through Intermedia (or whatever they’re calling it these days) to return a score for the query results. This is the easiest way to handle spelling errors and the scarf –> scarves type of plural problems.
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.
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. Or in other words, they already had a hammer…
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.
The moral? Their most likely trying to spin a bad workaround for a fragile infrastructure as a feature. Theories like they’re interested in additional data for mining imply that the management is competent, which isn’t likely in a big company.
If wildcard results were getting too useful for “unauthorized” uses by others (surveys, valuation) then eliminating these searches maks sense.
Roberto,
You need to get better informed friends. Lucene and Sphinx are third-party fulltext indexing and search engines for RDBMSs like MySQL that only offer a fulltext index and search capability in the archaic myisam storage engine. (MySQL promises that the next server version (5.6) will support fulltext indexing and search in the InnoDB storage engine, which is the modern, ACID compliant engine.) FYI, fulltext searches do not make use of wildcards.
Standard wildcard searching in RDBMSs is problematic when using a leading wildcard – that precludes the use of any index on that column. (Eg. SELECT foo, bar from T1 WHERE col LIKE ‘%needle%’;) There are no RDBMSs that can perform well under those conditions. A trailing wildcard presents no such problems.
You should include some database guys in your Rolodex of people to consult before hitting the publish button. 🙂
eBay’s search system has never allowed leading wildcards. The use of wildcards required a minimum of two leading alphanumeric characters.
Lucene is a full text search engine that has nothing to do with a RDBM , although I’m sure this is one of the more common use cases.
And it does support wild card searches. Leading wildcards are disabled by default by the default query parser but they work just fine if your server can handle the load.
Bob your instincts are absolutely right.
Having worked on the eBay mobile app for Android, the server farm isn’t “fragile”, but rather sensitive to clients that run out of control. eBay does not want to shut down customers who are using apps to drive business on their site, but this natural desire to provide availability has left eBay semi-blind to apps that run out-of-control, not maliciously, but due to bugs as you suggest from users just using wildcards in searches or something similar.
eBay has huge mobile traffic, but mobile is still a 2nd class citizen in the server APIs that have special back-doors for antique desktop browser interfaces.
eBay isn’t trying to screw your searches, they are concerned that you’re a bot comparing prices with sellers on Amazon and maybe a buggy app in a mindless loop.
So the search traffic — and the associated data mining — just goes to Google.
Robert dismisses wildcard searches as trivial, but any site the size of Ebay needs explicit indexes to perform quick lookups. If you want to support partial words with wildcards anchored at the beginning or the end, then you’ll need index entries numbering more than twice the characters in a word, per word, to create individual indexes for the partials. Said differently, the indexes will be roughly 16x the amount of disk space (and as much as 16x slower lookup) if the average word length was 8 characters. That’s not trivial.
For all of the mentioned factors… DDOSes could exploit the 16x hit to lookups to clog their databases, eliminating trolling for misspelled auctions, buggy apps, competitor data mining, and most importantly the fact that no other major searchable site actually supports wildcards… wildcards on Ebay were doomed to extinction eventually. It’s a shame, I was one of the few users of the feature.
The biggest problem with eBay isn’t the search but the venders. I’ve bought some used historic computer equipment for fun (old Mac, an Apple IIe). But the vender hasn’t even bothered to give it a basic clean. Not even wiping it down with a damp cloth.
Worse was some second hand clothes for my GF. Obviously you’re going to wash that anyway, but you’d like to think it was cleaned before shipping too!
PayPal have recently been blocking access from websites using their payment menthod (perfectly legal sites). It’s something to do with their API for making payments.
On one hand it seems that it’s deliberate, but on the other they claim it’s becaus the internet is broken. But they’ve also admited that their servers were at fault too. With PayPal taking ages to respond to requests for technical help, I can fully believe Bob’s suggestion that their IT is hanging on by a thread!
See:
https://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/192145-paypal-error-with-no-error-code/page__st__40
Clicking on the “Forums” link on the home page results in a blank page.
Now the forum link works for me. Scrolled down to the last post quoting PayPal’s response: “I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration that this issue has caused you. The issue was found in one of PayPal’s servers and was tracked under restore ticket number RESTR16428699. Unfortunately that is the only information I can release on this internal issue with our PayPal servers.” So it was a computer glitch…oops.
wait, people still use ebay??
Suggest a better alternative.
Craigslist.
Craigslist is local, not nationwide. Most of the stuff I can’t find via traditional sales channels like on-line or local stores are a bit unusual and my require a non-geographically limited search. Most of my eBay purchases arrive from out-of-state sources, sometimes out-of-continent.
All good points, except that eBay is so annoying the negatives far outweigh the positives. I stopped using it 7 years ago because it’s so awful, even though I never really found a substitute for it. I wonder how many others there are like me out there?At this point I bet if someone started an eBay clone there might be enough eBay haters out there to actually get it to fly.
Some people hate eBay, or PayPal, or Microsoft. What they all have in common is a combination of bureaucracy, technology, the Internet, huge size, and popularity. Something is bound to go wrong. Many times, as a do-it-yourselfer, I find myself saying “I love eBay”, simply because it was the only way to obtain an otherwise irreplaceable part.
Ironically *Google* dumbed down it’s search grammar recently (this week?) too. Can’t us “+” to indicate a word must be present anymore….. so maybe bing?
I don’t think the + ever worked for me. Gave up trying years ago.
What?! Do you have any more on this? It must’ve passed me by.
I use + searches fairly frequently so this is middling annoyance.
Regarding the loss of wildcard in Ebay I’m in the ‘stop bots and prevent misspellings being found by script’ camp.
Some months ago this changed. It now allows for you to search for things with + in the name (e.g. ‘C++’).
The new syntax is ‘intext:[term]’ (excluding braces). Away more awkward, but more flexible and powerful.
If the brackets are excluded, and the term includes a space, how would it look? For example intext:oqo 2+, in which all six characters must be present.
Use intext:”oqo 2+” to require “oqo 2+” in the results.
I doubt that would work since I don’t want the quotation marks in the text. Because Google ignores the quotes with intext, it gives the same result as intext:oqo 2+ or just “oqo 2+”. Google is afraid of refining searches too much such that it takes longer to find fewer hits. They don’t trust their users to be know what they want and how to express it.
ebay sucks.
I used to sell regularly on eBay, but over the years eBay just made life more and more difficult while raising fees, so one day I gave it up. This stupid change (which makes my life as an occasional buyer much more difficult) reminds me of when they decided to prevent sellers from leaving negative feedback for buyers.
I suppose they think they can do whatever they want since they’re king of the hill, but they haven’t made much money from me since I quit selling, and I have several friends who did the same. We hate eBay, and that’s never a good position for a company to be in.
Good decision. A business owner who feels the need to discriminate amongst their clients should probably not be in business in the first place.
I agree that the effect is to push the wild card searches over to public search engines in order for eBay to simplify their server load. Personally, I never seem to use that feature on either eBay or Google as I’m usually interested in limiting results and fighting the search engines’ desire to pretend they found what I’m looking for. The best example I can think of is the now defunct umpc company “OQO”. They produced a “Model 02” in 2007 which still sells on eBay for $400. But the prototype “Model 2+” (in its ideal configuration) never made it to mass production and sold for $6,000 the last time one was up for auction. Yet eBay ignores the “+”, so one needs to rely on other distinguishing features which may also limit search results too much.
Robert, you need to write something on the gradual crippling and abandonment of MSN / Live messenger.
I am going to guess that not many people used it, but it still had a concrete cost. I, for one, did not know it even existed until just now. Then again, I haven’t used ebay in such a long time that my paypal account self-terminated. A big reason was my annoyance at how difficult it is to narrow search results. A search for any kind of electronics usually gives me hundreds of pages of cases and cables at starting at 1c. The Amazon Marketplace is much less frustrating and slightly less full of crooks.
Just put the part number or whatever you know in a google search. You’ll get hits from everywhere, including eBay and Amazon, with the best choices just below the ads and near the top.
I have used eBay’s wildcard searches for years and am very annoyed by this move. But this is only the latest annoyance. Several months ago they removed a feature to only search for items available to country X (in my case, Israel). Just took it out. Now my search results are utterly cluttered by items I have no interest in. When I submitted a trouble ticket, the idiot CSR responded by telling me how awesome search is now in that it does this automatically. Only, it DOESN’T, and he didn’t even bother responding when I told him it doesn’t work as he claims. Ebay is so expensive nowadays (it’s pushing near 15% for sellers when you include the PayPal transaction fee) that for much of the stuff I buy, sites like dealextreme.com or aliexpress.com offer far better prices and service.
Another thing they removed was search only for items located in country X. I would also use this when I was specifically interested in looking for something in Israel. In this case, I see no reason at all to remove this, other perhaps some perceived notion of “clutter.”
Amazon has recently restricted us of their API so that you can’t search much. This is a bigger issue than ebay because the whole book business used Amazon results. Now they’re holding the data and this will squeeze out some used book sellers.
By 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.
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….
eBay is slowly killing itself, hopefully soon something better will come along. I don’t understand how eBay knows what a “best match” is either, another “feature” I truly hate. 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.
Removing the Wildcard is completely about making money, its not an IT issue for such a big company to run wildcard searches. If it was beneficial to USERS to not use a wildcard then, well, thats their choice to make. A company only takes the customers choice away to become more profitable. Far too many internet markets now cornered by one or two big names sadly, consumer choice is becoming a thing of the past. Google, eBay and Amazon sadly control our spending habits more than we realise
But google does what we want: uses page rank to display the most popular sites at the top, assuming you ignore the ads which they make easy to identify.
here is a really entertaining story about eBay, enjoy:
https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/01/online-commerce
At the level eBay is operating, anything and everything it does is for the benefit of itself. Saying it benefits the user is just lip service, sometimes referred to as lying.
Losing wildcard searches is a big deal to me. I have a number of searches where there is no way of replicating the search without wildcards. Very angry…..
I agree with Jon 100%.
Just looking for (landcruiser,toyota) (FJ4*,BJ4*) is now resulting in 0 results and there is no way to cater for the whole range.
The new “improved” searh on beu produces 0 results on all occasions.
And there I remember when ebay used to charge <1% and it was a fun little site…
I got this: “11 results found for toyota land cruiser fj4” . It’s just more natural language oriented.
i don’t agree with ebay…. this will bring more unnecessary information
it is one search method like google, but it can not compare to google, it may show more unnecessary data..
If you’re looking to search eBay with wildcards the classic way with proper/complete search results, we have a temporary workaround for this that you might like, over at WatchCount.com .
On our home page, just enter your search terms with wildcards/asterisks as you normally would, then click the “Show Me…!” button.
Whether or not you’re interested in our Most Watched Items search results (which currently handle the wildcard properly), you’ll see a note and special link at the top of search results — that link will take you to eBay and show you your wildcard search on eBay properly, processing the wildcard syntax as you intended it, the way it used to be!
A nice example of the differences between old and new wildcard handling on eBay: search for “18* -18” (without quotes) in the Books category. That aims to include listings with titles that include years in the 1800’s, but eliminate the simple number 18. When performing that search on eBay itself under the new wildcard processing system, you get zero results, since eBay ignores the wildcard and then negates the 18. With our special to-eBay search link, you’ll get the results you intended, many of them with the year 18xx in the title.
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Ebay has dropped many good features. Another good feature they dropped was their “pulse”. It was located at pulse.ebay.com and it displayed the hot and trendy products that eBay users were searching for. I found a website that restored this feature at: http://popularproducts.co . It appears eBay has given them permission to display what ebay Pulse used to display.