05-04-2007, 08:10 AM
Quote:***A Message from Jeff King: Improving the Finding Experience***
Hi...I'm Jeff King, and I lead the Finding team here at eBay. As part of eBay's strategy, the folks on my team have been working on improving how people find things on eBay. After all, you can't win that item if you can't find it. Redesigning something so crucial to eBay is a huge undertaking, but, fortunately, were coming from a strong base of knowledge in this area.
For years, eBay's proprietary search technology has supported a marketplace that gets hundreds of millions of searches a day. In addition, my team has gained valuable insight from other new finding experiences that we've introduced on eBay like eBay Express, our redesigned search results test (which we ran last winter), Best Match, and Motors 2.0. Your input and feedback on these projects has been invaluable, helping us figure out what works well and what does not.
The development cycle for projects like this requires lots of research, good design and development and, most importantly, ample testing in real market conditions. In the next few weeks, we'll be running a test of our latest Finding technology. For about six weeks, a small percentage of buyers (around 1%) will see a different search experience than what is currently available on eBay. This is project is similar to the "New Way to Shop" which we first tested back in 2005, although it has evolved significantly since then.
We think that this new technology will make eBay's search one of the most intelligent on the web, putting the right items in front of the right buyers more than ever before. In this new Finding experience, we'll still return listings where the item titles and descriptions match your search terms. And now we'll also use other elements of a listing as well (such as item specifics and category). This gives buyers the best chance of finding what they want without having to "guess at" all the terms the seller could've used in their item title.
As a simple example, if a buyer in the test searches for "red size 12 shoes," instead of looking just for listings with the words "red," "size," "12," and "shoes," the search engine will find all of the items in the shoe category that are size 12 in the color red. In the end, the buyer should see more relevant items. Plus they'll see a new way to narrow their listings results according to important details such as size, color, type, etc.
Because Finding is so important, you can continue to expect extensive testing like this as we work to ensure our designs and technology work for the marketplace. We expect this particular test to run about six weeks to allow us time to collect data and member input.
On behalf of my entire team, we appreciate your feedback and support.
I hate the words "finding experience" 
arcasm1: