eBay Overhauls Site, Search - Images from a Shopping Engine
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Naturally eBay is all excited about its changes; you can get to a list that highlights them from a link on the home page. The home page itself has been redesigned. It’s much less cluttered than I remember, with far less space given to sellers promoting their items and more to categories and other things that eBay itself may be promoting (like eco-friendly shipping boxes, Jay Leno’s writing desk, and other sites owned by eBay).
Since eBay is still testing out its new search engine, when you go to click on the link to check out the new experience, you enter The Playground. “The Playground is a separate eBay site that allows us to experiment without changing the entire eBay site,” explains the splash page. “Although a few features of regular eBay are not available on the Playground, bidding and buying are real. The main difference right now is how you find items.”
Let’s try a search for a ball peen hammer. Normally, I’d expect to see a long list, maybe up to 100 on a page, of ball peen hammers of all kinds, with thumbnail images next to the titles of the items. I could do some kind of advanced search to either reduce or increase the number of my results (including by price range).
The results page I actually get is actually far more helpful, especially if I’m visually oriented. Let me show you what I mean:
Whoa! Instead of a list, we get a bunch of images. At the top we see how many items turned up: 52. Also near the top we see the product type; in this case, it’s only one type – ball peen hammers – but if we did a search for, say, needle-nosed pliers, we get something a little more interesting. We get a product type, namely “Single Pliers,” and a box for keywords – just “needle-nosed” in this case.
On the left side you’ll see some specific ways to narrow down the field. You can choose a brand, a price range, or click on other options. You can also enter information into another search box (not shown; sorry, it got cut off in my picture) to help you narrow the search. But even this isn’t the most “killer” part of the overhaul.
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