When you do a "Find Item" search on eBay, are you seeing everything you should?

Apparently not, according to many users. A growing number of eBay members are frustrated with the way that eBay searches items using the "Title and Description" feature.

Here's what they find problematic: Go to eBay's Search Page and do a search of your own items by Title (the default setting). Do they show up along with all of the other auctions listed? Now do a search by Title and Description. (Check the little box under the text box.) Do your items still show up with up-to-date price and bid information? There's a strong likelihood that they don't.

There's a difference in the way eBay's search engine indexes items by "Title," and the way it indexes by "Title and Description." As many eBay users lament, the more thorough method of searching an item by Title and Description does not display items in a timely fashion. This is not a new issue for eBay, and as the auction site becomes busier, this search indexing bug has become more apparent.

What IS Search Indexing?
Indexing is the way eBay captures information about all the items on its site. Several times every day, eBay cycles through the auctions listed and gets information on new listings, high bid, current number of bids, etc., and adds this information to the database that you use to search.

To give you an idea of how this problem manifests itself, I'll relate my latest encounter with this "search bug." I had a Coca-Cola Display up for auction. When I searched by Title, the item came up with the current price and correct number of bids. When I searched by Title and Description, my item again came up - with no bids! To say the least, this can be disconcerting to the seller.

So what can you do to ensure that you are viewing current listings? Well, the solutions are more like stop gaps. The first solution is to only search by Title. While you will miss auctions that have your search term in the description field rather than the title field, it does give current information about the items it finds.

The other solution, according to eBay spokesperson Kevin Pursglove, is to click all the way through to the "View" page of an item. "Although admittedly, it can be a big inconvenience," explains Pursglove, "it might be the most reliable way of verifying the current status of an item."

Consider that eBay may have 5 million items up for auction at any one time. There may be several million people on the site searching and listing at one time. According to Pursglove, the increased activity on eBay can cause the indexing to take an extended period of time to complete, because the database is being continually added to and accessed at the same time.

"If it were a matter of putting in a new piece of hardware to speed up the process, we would do it in a second," says Pursglove. "Our technical people are constantly working to improve the functionality of the site."

The slow-down is more a function of the way eBay's search engine references and cross-references items by title, description, category, etc. The main purpose is to make searching the site as fast as possible.

The trade-off is that the searches are not always up-to-date.