Finding 2.0 - a good guide to what it is and how it works.

At eBay Live, I found a lot of confusion around Finding 2.0 and BestMatch. Most sellers+wall st. analysts assumed that BestMatch was the major enhancement to Finding that eBay has made.  That's not the case.  The way I describe it is:

• BestMatch - changes the order of the search results (not the results themselves)
• Finding2 - changes the result set (usually smaller) by trying to be smarter about helping the buyer find what they want. 

Of course BM has been live for a while, but Finding2 is just now making its way to the site.  In the UK, they seem to be at 100% F2 and in the US I believe they are doing 10% sample tests and you can find it in the playground.

In the AU, eBay published a guide to F2 that does a great job of explaining how this new system is different and how the system looks closer at the search string to pre-select attributes and what not for the consumer.  The result is definitely fewer results (that then go through BM) and hopefully a better buyer experience and more conversions.  If you are interested in the topic (and I think most sellers should be), I'd recommend downloading the PDF and giving it a quick read).

Comments

[Harley]

Geez let me think of the ways that eBay could ABUSE this for their own self gain. "Mcebay employee, Hmm lets dial down these CA users because Scot said something bad about us. Hmm we just invested in x company lets dial up their placement.

Hmm... new sucker err seller on the platform, lets dial up their exposure and suck them into the ebay dream, when we have them hooked we can drop them to back zero exposure.

Hmm lets push an item, brand, geo local, good customers/bad customers (insert special interest)

The difference between Google and eBay is that ebay is evil. Google makes things work and then figures out how to monetize them. eBay monetizes stuff and never figures out how to make things work.

Selling stuff that only sells will become ebay's mantra. I'm sure you have read "The Longtail" Scot and realize where this is heading? eBay was special once upon a time.

[Andy Geldman]

eBay's approach to searching contrasts sharply with Google's.

With Google you get one big, intuitive, search box. You will get a huge number of results but they will be ranked according to your search terms. What Google thinks is most important to you comes at the top but you still get to see everything else by walking through the search result pages.

I think eBay's BestMatch and Finding 2.0 approach is a laudable effort but flawed, because they are in conflict. If you are going to rank results well it's not necessary to restrict the number of results - people need to navigate from good matches to bad matches, because those "bad matches" may be what they actually want. This is a browsing-based approach to searching which suits most web users very well.

If you are going to offer a comprehensive drill-down, which is the aim of Finding 2.0, you are asking a lot of your users. People are used to the simple "one big search box" approach of Google, which means every type of search on the web should largely conform to that model. A search which requires you to click here and there, carefully considering dozens of checkboxes, and dealing with pop-ups in the middle of the page is not a good user experience. This approach will make users feel stupid, because you keep prompting them with lots of widgets along the lines of "did you mean...?"

Think again eBay, make search simple!

[guide]

Stevie, whats wrong with a guide?
Google has a guide- http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=basics&hl=en

Use it or not, you can still do efficient searches.

[steve]

So now you need a guide to conduct an efficient search on eBay.

I'm speechless.