 Hey there everyone, welcome back. eBay have revealed it's going to be rolling out even more changes to its search engine in the new year. The company has been receiving numerous complaints from users and sellers regarding the current search engine's performance. The most common complaints include the search engine returning irrelevant results and for failing to match search terms appropriately. In response to these criticisms, eBay has announced that it will be making significant updates to its search engine in early 2024. The goal of these changes is to enhance the overall search experience for both buyers and sellers. Now eBay representatives have assured users that the revamped search engine will be more accurate and efficient, providing users with the relevant results they are searching for. And the company has also stated that it will be focusing on improving the search engine's ability to understand user intent and match certain search terms accordingly. Now while some eBay users express concern that the changes could make the search engine even worse, the company remains confident that the revamp will be beneficial for everyone. Now eBay states it is committed to providing users with a seamless and efficient search experience. Well from my experience that doesn't always come out the other side of the wash as the way they intended, but either way. So some of the key changes that eBay is planning to make to its search engine are improved accuracy and relevance to search terms. eBay will be using machine learning algorithms to better understand user intent and match search terms to relevant listings. They're expecting to use an enhanced image search capabilities and the search engine will be able to recognize objects and scenes in images, making it easier to find listings based on visual search. They're also looking at personalized search results. Now the search engine will be able to tailor or is intended to be able to tailor results based on a user's past search history and preferences. And there will also be real-time search updates. What they technically class as real search though, I don't know, we're from my experience, real time isn't always real time, but the search engine will be constantly updated with new listings ensuring that users always have the most up-to-date information. Now these changes are expected to make eBay search engine more efficient, user friendly and relevant for both buyers and sellers. The revamped search engine is a significant step forward for eBay though in its mission to provide a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience once they get through these teething issues as we all know nothing ever goes quite to plan. Maybe this sounds negative, but there is always that learning curve. Now it's just trying to remember and keep sight of the end goal. Now you may well be glad that eBay are waiting to change its search engine, especially as we all know glitches, faults and teething issues generally occur when they do these updates. On the other hand, does this mean that the festive shoppers may well have struggled to find what they were looking for and moved to other platforms or brick and mortar stores for their purchases and we lost sales as a result? Now we know that eBay have been integrating a lot of new features and embedding new software and coding into their platform to improve and refine searches and placement. They've also done a huge injection of AI vector similarity coding into the platform. I stated back in September that the description box AI creator was not for making listings more fluffy, but a targeted design change to gather items specifics and key words to help with indexing and placement. Now the next category chain, sorry, the next category changes were also postponed from October this year and moved to early 2024 as well. Could these two massive changes be connected? Will they devastate new year sales with these changes or will they hold off till mid spring? For many they've already destroyed sales for quarter three and quarter four in 2023. It's becoming more and more evident that eBay does have a future plan but do they have the infrastructure and skilled teams to pull it off before the site is negatively impacted beyond repair? Will the only sellers that will be left on the platform be the most stubborn or the select favorite diehards or the big brand names that they're heading towards? There's a lot of scope here but there's also a lot of gray areas and there's a lot of rooms with light switched off as it were. We know eBay are never forthright with the direct facts and they keep it very close to their chest. Obviously the impact of too much information could affect their bottom line but there's a lot of change coming, a lot more change still to come. It does sound like that the AI learning growth is not going the way they were expecting or at least to some degree. Let's just hope that with the early 2024 updates this is going to help us return back to or if not exceed where we were prior to this massive road of change that seemed to happen around the April time of 2023. Well until next time keep reselling, take care and remember keep it real.