John Donahoe’s Plan to Save eBay: Better Search - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

eBay plans to evolve by more effectively exploiting search

Now the company is working on something far more ambitious: a system that will evaluate customer feedback, data from its PayPal payment system, shipping costs and so on to present the very best deals to shoppers.

“With eBay and PayPal, we have more closed transaction data than anyone else on the Internet,” Mr. Donahoe said. “There is a lot of talk about Google’s relevance-based search,” he said referring to Google’s system of showing ads based on how often users click on them. EBay can use more information to provide better results, he said.

John Donahoe’s Plan to Save eBay: Better Search - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog