Jeff King Tells Us About the Recent Best Match Issue

Over the past few days, there’s been some buzz on our discussion forums and within the blogosphere about an issue with our Best Match sort. As one member put it, “why when searching using Best Match, do the results show as the newly listed first? If I hit refresh, they go to regular Best Match? Just asking because I have a few ending today (of course!), and it looks as though they are showing up on the last page instead of first?”

To find out what happened, we went to Jeff King, who heads up our Finding team. Here’s what he said:

“We had a very unusual software bug that we unfortunately didn’t catch during our testing process. Essentially, it caused Best Match to sometimes sort items incorrectly over roughly the past 3 days, which is why the member mentioned in this post saw what they did. The members who did see these strange results were able to fix it by refreshing, but of course that’s not an acceptable solution to either us or them. We had teams working 24 by 7 to get this fixed as soon as we discovered it.”

So is the issue now fixed?

“Yes, we’ve fixed the problem, and Best Match is working properly again for all searches.”

What are we doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again?

“We of course don’t want things like this to happen, and we apologize to all the members who saw this strange Best Match sort order. We’ve already changed our testing process to make sure that this won’t occur again.”