eBay search fail

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: js

    > I've seen similar behavior before, and other search problems. At one
    > point in time, eBay's search engine worked just fine. Then, a number of
    > years ago, they revised their - supposedly making it 'smarter' - and
    > ever since then, it hasn't worked as well

That's troubling. I wonder if there are any heuristics one/we can apply to
work around this failure? We can't really add a zillion different words
('parts', etc) to searches in an attempt to work around this bug.

I'd previously noticed that searches for 'pdp-11' turned up things with
'pdp11' in the title, so they apparently internally drop the '-'. (Google
does a similar thing.) I just tried, and searching for '"pdp-11"' (i.e. exact
multi-word match, which I use for '"Digital Equipment"') still turns up
'pdp11' items. Case ('PDP-11' versus 'pdp-11') doesn't seem to matter
either. 

On a whim, I tried searching for '"pdp-11" "pdp-11"' (i.e. just repeated the
keyword), and this time it _did_ turn it up! Very odd. I wonder why that made
a difference? Well, I guess I'll just have to add that to my list of searches.
Until the next one...


Interestingly, this does blow up one theory that I had about what caused the
failure. I had assumed they have lots of threaded lists, with e.g. all 'foo'
items on a list from a 'foo' header, and when given a search for 'foo bar'
they'd just go to the 'foo' list and run down it looking for items with
'bar'. So my theory was that there'd been an error, and the item in question
never made it onto the 'pdp11' list; the 'pdp-11 parts' search found it via
the 'parts' list.

But I have no potential explanation at all how '"pdp-11" "pdp-11"' found it!
FWIW, 'pdp11 pdp11' worked too. Bizarre.

	Noel