I’m curious how Gameflip decides what listings are displayed and which listings are displayed first or in what order when I search for something.
I have recently seen a large number of one-day sellers flood the market place with listings and in the listing description instead of giving some information about the product they mass spam the game/item title thousands of times. This would suggest it is a rather simple formula whereby it searches for the words and returns what has the largest number of matches to this word.
It has now become officially impossible to have your items seen on the first page or two of the results that come back from a search.
Surely this is wrong and there must be a more fair and equitable way to allow sellers to actually have their listings seen. I don’t want to join the description spam war but that may be the only way to actually have a fighting chance so that buyers can see my listings.
I have attached an example taken from a description
(look at where the scroll bar is to get an idea of how many times they have spammed the game title into the listing) but if you wish more details I can provide alot of seller details and listing as examples. Just type in Rocket League or Dishonoured 2 into the search field and you’ll be able to get a taste of what I’m talking about.
I’m more expecting a conversation than any real action but it would be good to have both 
What ideas or how better would you improve the Relevancy search?
Well, from what I have read you can simply remove what is referred to as vtermfrequency which means that when your algorithm searches for a term that you tell it you don’t care about how frequently the term appears in a document and your results are then not displaying based on the number of times a search term is present.
This would ensure that your returns have the term present but are not purely predicated on the number of times it appears.
Or you can actually have search results become negatively marked due to duplicate content. The number would have to be realistic but who really needs to reference the name of the item you’re selling more than 5 times?
You can also bias returns based on content length which would favor those who provide more information. This all depends on what standard Gameflip want to use to determine a “good” listing.
Personally I think listings should be ranked on relevance, content length and if the same user is displayed on a table multiple times then after their first return their other listings should be relegated to the bottom of the list. This would give buyers a better spread of their options. Filters then could be used to refine what is displayed in order of preference.
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Agreed. I’ve had to jump on board with this as the Fortnite section is filled with sellers that bury other peoples items with this method. It’s either hop on board until something is officially done about it or get no sales. 
Two things that are really frustrating as a seller is doing this relevancy dance and people postings 300x the same listing and burying everyone’s listings away. At this point i’d rather abandon relevancy search altogether and add a search by feedback score option
This thread is outdated because the search algorithm was changed a week ago. Please use this thread to discuss it.
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