What has gone wrong with the Ebay search engine!

[alec-barny]

I searched for a motorhome satellite dish automatic and the best match is a male vibrator sex toy ! It's listed in Satellite dishes, I reported the item for wrong category and Ebay found it is not in violation of policies.

Earlier I tried to find a UK 240v socket and was presented with usb chargers.

Strangely I did find the items I wanted but only from the rows of promoted items.

So to find what you are looking for do the search, ignore the results and choose the correct item from promoted list. Then refine the search based on that.

Free to sell but only promoted items get listed properly?

And as a seller, I recently listed a 12gb Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card, an item that would normally be viewed many times, well after 2 days 0 views. After promoting at just 5% sold in a couple of hours!

Something is wrong.

[eburtonlab]

Some recommendations if you are having problems searching:

Avoid "Best Match" sort order; lately that sort order finds more results that are less relevant than other sort orders.

eBay considers keywords in the item-specifics -- not just the title -- to be potential matches for your search terms.

eBay may substitute or correct your search terms if a slight change produces more results. This can be useful if you make a simple typo, or if there is an alternative name for what you are searching for, but not every change is a welcome one. If you know what you are looking for and you do not want any substitutions or corrections, put one of your search keywords in quotes to defeat that feature.

eBay often steers a search into a particular category based on keywords used; sometimes sellers list in that category because that is where eBay is steering the customers, rightly or wrongly.

Some unscrupulous sellers go so far as to include irrelevant keywords in the item-specifics of the seller's listings to ensure that listing appears in the maximum number of search results. This can be annoying to searchers, but is not really the fault of the search programming; it is entirely the fault of those unscrupulous sellers interfering with the search.

This search for "motorhome" satellite dish automatic seems to provide reasonable results for me:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=%22motorhome%22+satellite+dish+automatic&_sacat=0&_sop=10

A UK 240v socket is a trickier search, since so many listing include all those terms if they include a plug for that socket.

One potential search, assuming you are looking for an actual socket rather than an adapter:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/259273/i.html?_nkw=UK+%22240v%22+plug+socket+-remote&_sop=10

[alec-barny]

Non of that tells me why a sex toy should appear in satellite dishes category ? 

[cahic6632]

Presumably for the same reason pages of new bathroom taps and showers appear in the vintage porcelain wall plaque listings. 🙂

[eburtonlab]

Non of that tells me why a sex toy should appear in satellite dishes category ?

You would have to ask the seller why the seller chose that category for a definitive answer.

[1956glyn]

It could be that only a few pre approved business sellers can sell such items....and they may have got around this by listing it in the totally wrong category.

[alec-barny]

It's against policies to list items in the wrong category, but when I pointed that out the AI found nothing wrong with the listing.

But that is not the point. It seems like the whole search mechanism has changed in some way to steer us towards promoted items and produce incorrect results in the main list.