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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Whatever you do, don't break eBay.

I love eBay, for both buying and selling used items that are viable to ship.

We let CraigsList get broken, with seemingly much fewer sellers and buyers than it used to have.

I tried Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to. But I won't install their app, and the notification emails only sometimes came through. (One buyer became very irate when I didn't respond promptly.) Also, their pretend E2E encryption for messages on their Web site was just annoying (like a dark pattern intended to make people hate E2E, while not actually providing any significant security).

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> ”Whatever you do, don't break eBay. […] Facebook Marketplace, which is where most local buyers&sellers seemed to move to.”

I too actually rely on eBay as an alternative to _every other online store_.

It’s curious you mention facebook and eBay together. I find FBMP completely unusable because of what their search feature returns—garbage. It functions like their whole platform by trying to grab your attention with things it thinks you might want (how else to interpret unrelated results?) but didn’t ask for.

Despite eBay hobbling their search feature by removing Boolean operators, I find the two platforms couldn’t be more different.

This would of course negatively impact eBay because it would now be saddled with immense debt. To pay this debt, there would be mass layoffs leading to a decline in customer service, quality and innovation.

Deals like this benefit nobody but shareholders (in the short term) and lenders. The workers at the companies get laid off, consumers get worse products, and the odds of bankruptcy spike. Leveraged buyouts seem like a net negative to society.

eBay has been a savior for me buying for buying old / replacement parts. No idea where some of these sellers get their inventory but I'm so glad they exist and we can both use eBay to transact.

If only eBay would fix their search. In the old days the search modifiers actually did what you think they should do. It's been broken for over 20 years now.

What search modifiers? I regularly use minus, double-quotes, and parentheses, and they all work well for me.

The main thing I dislike about eBay search is all the sponsored placements violating the sorting order. For example, if you sort on increasing price, sponsored placements not in the specified sorting order litter that heavily, making it hard to follow. Amazon searches have the same problem. (Problem, from the perspective of buyer-on-the-marketplace.)

The other thing I dislike about both eBay and Amazon searches is the spamming of huge numbers of listings for essentially the same item. I notice it more on Amazon than eBay.

The minus, double-quotes and parentheses work in many situations, but not in all situations, all of the time. They used to be deterministic. Just this week I found some more searches where wrapping a specific two-word phrase in quotes would actually remove half of the auctions that had that exact phrase in the title. And others where minusing out a term stubbornly refused to remove it.

The worst thing is when you are searching for an item, but most of the listings are those "multiple different specification" listings. e.g. a seller has 8GB, 16GB and 32GB USB sticks. It's almost impossible to compare listings and the price you see is clickbait because once you click through you find the thing you were searching for is several times higher. I wrote a bookmarklet to remove all these, but that's not ideal because it can over-correct.

Now that you mention it, I infrequently see behavior like that.

I wonder whether I see it less often because my bookmarked search queries are careful to avoid things in the URL that look like they might be IDs for cached queries/results.

Also, a few times I wondered whether I was accidentally triggering anti-scraping poisoning measures, even though I was doing the search and paging manually.

First thing gamestop did when they bought Impulse (digital game distribution service) is make it US only.

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