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Search and Best Match
Posted by
Curtis Gavin
Thursday, Jun.18.2009, 4:08 PM PT
Wow, I really liked the Search and Best Match - What's Coming in 2009 session. Olivier Dumon, Senior Director of Search at eBay, spoke clearly (despite the French accent) and candidly about the goals for search ranking and the contributing factors that influence ranking. Olivier was joined by Dane Glasgow, Vice President of eBay Global Search, and together, they played to a full room.
Olivier started with the top three search objectives, in order of importance:
- Elevate the best deals
- Improve quality of service on eBay
- Balance auction and fixed price listings in search results
Olivier went on to describe how Best Match works and some of the factors that contribute to Best Match search ranking, including:
- Recent sales
- Title relevancy
There are other factors, such as seller ratings and shipping costs that figure in, but Olivier concentrated on recent sales and title relevancy. Did you know that including popular search words that aren't relevant to your item can lower your listing's search ranking?
Olivier provided insight into why recent sales play such an important role in search rankings, despite a focus on best deals. He noted that with structured listings, that is listings with item specifics/attributes, price does become a dominant ranking factor, but many listings on eBay are not catalog-based and contain relatively unstructured data. In lieu of consistent standard data for some items, eBay relies on the data from actual buyers to help determine comparative search relevancy. Items with increased sales velocity filter to the top.
In this session, as in the Keynote, the importance of building eBay's catalog support was stressed. Again, we heard that the investment on eBay's part was huge, and the priority paramount. Olivier did note, however, that catalog adoption might make his job obsolete. Well, maybe just simpler.
This session had lots of good dialog between the audience and Olivier and Dane. Olivier and Dane fielded questions about the scenarios in which recent sales history does or does not carry over to new listings, how sellers of single item listings (e.g., collectibles) can improve their search ranking, and how do FeaturedFirst and FeaturedPlus fit in with the search objectives.
Nobody wanted to leave.
Oh, yeah. What's coming? eBay is developing a tool that will help sellers with the following questions:
- Where is my item in the search ranking?
- How can I bring my item to the top?
Can't wait to see this tool. It should be part of SR2.
-Curtis
