I’m not sure the real reason behind ebaY’s change to the search by removal of the wildcard (*) asterisk feature, but clearly there is something very wrong with that picture for all sorts of reasons. Their explanations have been debunked, with numerous, well enunciated examples given. Literally too many examples to link to.

If ever there was de-evolution, this is the textbook example.

When you see the proposed workarounds (aka complete re-education LoL) suggested by ebay fluffers, smoothers, apologists and shills, it’s truly beyond laughable.

The web is finally beginning to wake up a little, and theories as to why the change abound. Anything from dDoS, to a future plan to monetize increased search functions etc… Knowing ebaY and the quest for wallet share amid increasing decline, nothing is out of the question.

However, what I believe I may have found is that they might have chosen a search architecture technology which simply doesn’t support wildcards, but instead is geared more towards social data mining tracking functions than delivering results?

Could be this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11681522/wildcard-search-in-cassandra-database

http://www.slideshare.net/jaykumarpatel/cassandra-at-ebay-13920376

http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2012/07/16/cassandra-data-modeling-best-practices-part-1/

http://cassandra.apache.org/

It would seem that ebaY wants to to hunt and search and peck away so that they can parasitize your data, keep you on their site longer and increase their views/traffic?

Here’s the Cassandra at ebaY slideshow frame #8 from ebay tech blog Architect at ebaY Jay Patel

And now here’s a fresh item from ebay.

Note those social buttons? Aside from the color, they appear to be the same. Bear in mind that your mileage may vary, as ebay has been changing page formats literally by the minute.

So still I’m left wondering whether this is part of Cassini? There’s been quite a bit about this, and I’m not sure I’ve been able to keep up with it all. Has Cassini been scrapped in favor of this Cassandra? Is Cassandra only an element of Cassini? Is Cassandra an interim solution? Did Cassini blow up? I find this all very amusing after all the hype surrounding Project Cassini.

I’d like to see some plain English explanations or opinions  from search engine developers as to what might be going on. I mean, is wildcard search in general a strain on the systems? Can a mere .35% of users actually drain the resources of a mufti-billion dollar “World Class” web entity? What I have seen doesn’t show ebaY in a good light.

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