[snowwrestler]

It’s astounding how bad FB Marketplace search is, though. For very popular things, it’s fine. For browsing and “huh, that’s interesting,” it’s fine.

But if I am looking for something specific, it is an incredible failure. It’s so bad I suspect they intentionally don’t want it to work well. That is, I think they only want to optimize for low-effort social buying, not picky people who know exactly what they want.

For this reason I have bought way more stuff off eBay than FB Marketplace recently.

[bpye]

It seems to just ignore filters like “date listed” sometimes too. And people will list items at nominal prices and give the actual price in the description. Generally a poor experience.

[cute_boi]

Was looking for car, and found out they mentioned down payment lolz. FB marketplace is very bad.

[nkrisc]

I know some car listing sites (used to, at least) offer ad products to dealerships that would post their inventory on FB Marketplace as well.

[jrmg]

It also doesn’t seem to respect the distance filter.

I’m not one for conspiracy theories usually, but I’m pretty sure the state of Marketplace search is, if not ‘deliberate’, at least a result of metrics-driven development. The search results are _just_ useful enough to keep you scrolling and tapping, so the vagueness increases engagement :-(