How ranking works
Search results are ordered by three published factors and nothing else. The order is the order: two people typing the same words see the same list.
What decides the order
- Textual relevance
- 0.60How well the words match, with the title weighted above the description
- Title closeness
- 0.15How near your words are to the title as a phrase
- Recency
- 0.25Freshness, halving roughly every seven days
Choosing “newest” or “price” replaces the blend entirely with that one rule. Price ordering happens within a single currency, because nothing is converted.
What will never affect it
- No personalisation.Your results are not shaped by what you looked at before. Discovery is not a profile of you.
- No paid position.Nobody can buy a place in this list. If that ever changes it will be labelled in place, not disclosed in a footer.
- Nothing our risk system knows.Internal risk signals cannot move a seller up or down. A quiet demotion is a punishment nobody announced and nobody can appeal, so it is not available to us.
- No engagement weighting.Views, watchers and click-through do not enter the score. Ranking on attention is how a marketplace ends up rewarding the loudest seller rather than the most honest one.
When you find nothing
A misspelling falls back to close matching rather than an empty page, and partial words match as you type. If a search still returns nothing, that is the honest answer — the list is not padded with loosely-related items to look busy.