This paper is too dense for me to read through at this moment, but eBay must be a real disappointment for its shareholders:
Despite its head start at being a platform for online retail open to anyone, eBay stock has only doubled in 10 years, or in other words, added $12b in equity value (currently $24b). Imagine that: a successful tech company with a real product in a market that’s going stratospheric (online shopping) has lagged the S&P 500.
Meanwhile Amazon has octupled, which works out to adding $864b in market value.
In other words, Amazon has added 36 eBays worth of equity to itself in the last 10 years.
Ok, I haven’t looked at corp debt to calculate these numbers based on enterprise value, but that could make the numbers worse: eBay is asset-light with little physical infra compared to Amazon.
eBay’s fees have gone through the roof, so I suspect its volume has been decreasing.
Maybe with more listings eBay can lower their fees so that low margin items are able to be sold. And maybe with some competition between the two there might be a reduction of fees and a return to quality. Sadly I don’t think eBay is competing effectively, their website still sucks and I can’t get anything resembling an invoice for taxes, maybe it’s there but I haven’t seen it, I don’t use eBay very often.
I find this incredibly hard to believe. The hard limit on the number of total listings was deemed such an intractable problem to solve that rather than focus all engineering efforts for a few months on raising it, they just threw up their hands, didn’t even attempt to solve it, and tried to increase revenue solely through higher listing fees?
Another anecdote is in a sea of tech companies that try to attract talent with perks/ benefit/ even high salaries Amazon had none. Amazon prides itself for making a table out of a door to save money (no joke). But arguably Amazon employees made bank in Amazon because of its stock growth, definitely more compared to Google, Apple, Meta, maybe similar to Microsoft. Finally of all companies, Amazon is the only big tech I know that veered off its main product and still dominated. AWS is completely off the left field for Amazon, it makes me optimistic that Amazon might become a juggernaut in healthcare too (they definitely are trying).
This cannot be said about Amazon, Aliexpress, both which intentionally (I guess) mix similar items with results that match the search query.
I hope that eBay keep those two things distinct.
I made a tiny amount of money doing typo arbitrage on bundles labelled as “Nitendo” many years ago.
Sometimes when I wanted a really niche item, I’d wait for one of those alert emails that had more than usual results because I knew the bidding would be split.
Why are some sellers having all their listings (car parts) included in my search for "Tasmota"?
In your example however, it seems to me that if you add quotes, the irrelevant results are gone: https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=%22Tasmota%22
HNSW uses lots of RAM and it’s interesting how all the major engines settled on that algo.
I’m interested in how they apply filtering, since with codebook based similarity such as PQ and ScANN it’s not trivial.
Maybe one day we’ll also see someone implement a production ready Vamana engine too, which also does really well at the billion scale.
Tree-based vector indexes aren't bad either, especially if we can find a way to make the random projections more efficient.
I think similarity search is a commodity now; I would not invest in developing an in-house solution given the abundance of good commercial solutions.
