Today, additional details of how the improved search techniques will be integrated into eBay have been published, and it may be just the thing that eBay needs. The New York Times is reporting that collective data based on transactions on eBay, handled through PayPal, can provide a great wealth of information that can be used for search.
If eBay can infer the right quantitative data from all these transactions, then it will be able to provide improved search results based on information it knows about the users behind this transactional data. Search results can then be reorganized according to a different set of priorities, such as the best seller, the cheapest price for fixed-price items, etc. While this may sound better on a higher theoretical level, "it will present a big challenge for eBay’s sellers," notes The Times. "Instead of having listings shown based on very clear criteria, such as the auction closing time or price, they will be ranked by eBay’s subjective and probably opaque algorithms."
