Ebay is the pinnacle of broken search and navigation! They should be winning awards, industry accolades, Webbies, the works!

I find eBay search more predictable than amazon. When I use amazon I feel that they show to me what they think I should get instead of what I want.

Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.

Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.

Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.

Yes, both Amazon and EBay are bad examples.

They are old-school because they are lazy about it, not because something is already optimized.

Whenever I hear about how great a Amazon is as a company, I just do a single search and am dumbfounded.

Example:

If you type the name of a product - even when it is in their catalogue - it may not come up.

Search for 'mousr' on Amazon and you only see PC mouses.

The only way you can get to the mousr product is by typing the company name.

It's ridiculous.

Tip of the iceberg.

I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.

I find eBay search pretty fine for my purposes. They could allow for more fine-gained structured descriptions, though.

Amazon search is in comparison much more... approximate.