Lew Schiller

Seems CL needed to make a change for the sake of change so they decided to offer search options Newest Relevance and Price with Relevance as default when you search in All for Sale.

I just spent some time going back and forth on their feedback forum about making the default newest...to no avail.

Here in Denver the highest relevance ad in my Sewing Machine search in All for sale is this one:

http://denver.craigslist.org/art/4164675772.html
Nice machine - fair price

Lowest relevance on the front page - first 100 listings -
http://denver.craigslist.org/atq/4150078924.html

Lowest relevance overall - over 500 deep - is this Pfaff Industrial
http://denver.craigslist.org/hsh/4163197752.html

You can still select newest but you have to do so every time

I'm beginning to wonder if some AHCA coders haven't jumped ship and gone to CL?

J Miller

I just went and checked. Yep, they fixed it and now it's broke. Just like facebook and photobucket.

Joe

tessagin

Why can't they leave well enough alone?!

Skyangel

They must be the same programers who designed the yahoo groups Neo.

NJ Quilter

That apparently started a few days ago. I just click on 'newest' at the top right side of the screen and it re-sorts to that default. Granted, something that really wasn't broken to begin with, but not as horrible as some other 'fixes' I've seen.

SteveH

I hope you realize these sites are run for the advertisers not for the customers...

It's a shame, same as the death of Singer and Sears... pandering to profit watchers, not pride in product...

Lew Schiller

But these are free ads. Where's the profit motive?
The response I got was - it's for about spam reduction.
This will make people write better ads..they said.
I thought that's what flagging was for.
When I asked what makes for greater "Relevance" I was told that that's a secret
When I pointed out that the only thing that seemed to make the #1 ad in Sewing Machine Search Relevance #1 was word count I was told that doesn't matter - but again they wouldn't tell me what does.
When I pointed out that this was quite an afront to those for whom English is not a primary language or those who lack creative writing skills we stopped conversing.

Yes - for those of us who work CL like a slot machine we'll make the extra selection of Newest but what about people unfamiliar with CL? There's no Introduction page that tells them that the results they will see - unless they choose newest - will be presented in a random order based on "Relevance" and that a lot of what they're presented with will already be sold.

I'm suggesting to everybody who uses CL regularly that they go to the feedback forum and post their opinion - one way or another.

All I really wanted to convey to them was
A: Ok - can't you make Newest the Default and Relevance the Option?
B: How about a setting where we can choose which we prefer?

oldsewnsew

and Yahoo Groups!

Sheluma

I think that would require either a cookie, which could get deleted (many people delete cookies after each session), or a CL sign-in with custom user pages. That would require a lot more resources on their servers.

I thought my CL wasn't broken yet, but it's because I search from my bookmarks so my searches didn't change. I see their point about spam, but I wonder if they're planning to have sponsored listings which will be at the top in the default search. The people who search every day will figure out what's going on. For people who don't search every day -- does it matter what order the results are in? I know it's annoying to have them decide what's relevant. But I've gotten used to computers making decisions for me. I used to fight it by "fixing" my settings so that I was in control, but it's a never ending battle so I gave up on most issues. And computers are slowly getting better at doing it right. I still control my spam settings on my mail server (I don't let them decide what is spam and what isn't.) My BIL used to be a relevance analyst for a search engine. When he described it to me it sounded like he was mostly trying to get irrelevant results pushed to the bottom. It's not an exact science.

Are you going to get that Two Spool?? I have a friend in Denver. I might have to make him go get this if you don't want it.

Sheluma

PS -- The reason they don't want to tell you how they determine relevance is that you could potentially use this information to help make your spam more relevant. (the generic "you" -- I know you're not!)