Taobao search sucks?

[Manuel]

I use Taobao a lot and yet I may be doing something wrong, but I often notice that products that can be found when browsed for manually within a Taobao store cannot be found by means of Taobao's search function. This means that if you search for all "intel" unfortunately you will not be presented with a list of all products whose title contain the word "intel", so someone should be fired at Taobao. I've contacted customer support three times about this and they do squat about it, they obviously don't care. Their search engine is complete rubbish. How is this useful in any way??

To add insult to injury, sorting also results in matches being randomly omitted, thus, after applying a sort the match count will be less than before applying it. Note that the omitted results do match the search criteria. An unconspicuous notice at the very bottom of the page makes everything so much better:

为了方便您找到满意的宝贝，淘宝已省略部分不规范或不相关宝贝查看全部宝贝

方便你妹！！

Sorting means sorting, not sorting and randomly removing matches. Some times after applying a sort the system will go as far as to tell you that no matches were found, even though before sorting there were several pages worth of matches. Mad stuff!

You need to manually click the blue text reading 查看全部宝贝 to also include the omitted results. This took me a while to figure out, and I think it's ridiculous, and I am not sure it really displays everything.

Has anybody noticed this? Are there any workarounds?

[eshton]

The search function works pretty well if you use characters to search. Using pinyin or english alphabet is really horrible. I don't personally sort much on Taobao so I wouldn't know about that part.

[Manuel]

I use characters when appropriate, depends on the product really. If it's a model number e.g. "FR5" then there's no character equivalent. Using pinyin naturally doesn't work because nobody uses pinyin on Taobao.

What do you mean you don't sort much on Taobao? Sorting by price/popularity is the first thing I do after every search. This is very useful in finding the best deals.

[eshton]

I usually find my what I need after searching. I search for the type of product before looking at brands and model no.

[zhwj]

At least in the search you linked, it looks like the matches that were removed were bait-and-switch items -- the 0.5 yuan item with the image of a brake disc, for example, is actually a multiple-item listing that offers a choice between a 0.5 yuan nut and a 15.5 yuan disc (a higher price than the lowest-priced 12 yuan disc offered by "xiaopowr" on the filtered results page). In other words, the listing doesn't match the actual item, which is probably what "不规范或不相关宝贝" means.

[Manuel]

Based on my experience Taobao searches are based exclusively on title text not description text, so it has no way to tell whether the an item is bait-and-switch. Plus a lot of descriptions are images rather than text. Furthermore, a computer cannot tell whether an item is relevant or not, that's for me to decide, and that's why filters in any database are imposed manually by the user. Hopefully they will improve this.

There might be a setting in the user configuration to disable this, so I am off to check that.

[Manuel]

你们知道吗：
以前到淘宝上购物，很高兴，因为它上面价格比街上商店低多了。
但是，现在一点都高兴不起来：你们大家知道吗？？现在用淘宝的搜索，价格低的商品不出现，为了利益，淘宝网偏袒商城，为了利益，正在无视消费者，正在走向灭亡。
我已经很明确、好多次：明明有低价的商品，网页存在，但是在淘宝网搜索，却怎么都搜不到！！即使划定价格范围，也不出现。作为我们买家消费者，怎样才能买到低价商品。求助！！
现在中国只有一个淘宝网，占的比例太大了，已经开始走下坡路了
真诚地希望中国哪个公司，出一个“淘巧网”（巧：就是便宜），用最低的价格来让我们消费者得到实惠！！
谁有最好的对付淘宝网不出现低价的搜索引擎的结果，谁有更好的办法！！我将百度分全献出来
希望大家——所有的消费者，来顶！！

From here.

[roddy]

Translations and explanations for non-Chinese readers appreciated...

[Manuel]

Sorry hehe. The important bit is the bit highlighted in red, which means: "low-priced items don't show up in the search results". Basically, cheap items that definitely do exist and that you have somehow stumbled upon are not displayed after you sort the results in ascending order of price, which is the obvious thing to do when you are trying to find the best deal. This smells like Taobao has a partnership with certain sellers and manipulates search results to their advantage, which is bad for both sellers that are left out and of course buyers.

[MikeChang]

It's too bad China makes it so difficult for overseas companies to operate. I actually prefer eBay's policies and interface over Taobao. Hopefully, there will be trade reform in the near future but I won't hold my breathe. The same thing happened when Google tried to enter the market. Chinese government sponsored hackers stole Google's intellectual property and that is how Baidu was born.

[Manuel]

I don't think Taobao's crappy search engine is connected in any way the government. IMHO Taobao kicks eBay's bum in every other way except for the search facilities.

[akclau]

I found Taobao's search and filter pretty good actually... what are you trying to search for that gets you so frustrated?

[Manuel]

Taobao often won't show items that exist, which means you are never sure you are getting the best deal. Like I said, sorting results in the number of matching items to drop. Sorting is not the same as filtering, yet Taobao keeps applying some magical filters to every search, which means that often you can find a give product "manually" by clicking a link provided by the seller, but searching for words in the product title will not display that particular product. Some times Taobao goes as far as to say "No matching products found" even though the product exists and matches the search query, and it is not marked as "out of stock". Reminds me of Windows Explorer search...