The approach stems from the realisation that as more people shop online, they often end up at the top of the website typing in a product name. If this approach does not result in them being able to find what they want quickly, they are likely to go to a competitor website or venture into a physical store.
EBay’s venture into the world of search engine technology is not new: the company poached several engineers from Microsoft Corp’s Bing search unit to develop their new search engine Cassini, to be rolled out next year; while Walmart has also recently launched its own search engine on its own website.
Scot Wingo, CEO of Channel Advisor said, “Amazon is on version 8.0 of search. Ebay is 2.0, but they are thinking about how they make this huge leap to 3.0”.