AIRBNB Search Flaw Knocks-out Host

[Michael2317]

Sept. 27, 2018

Users of AIRBNB's home sharing and vacation rental website are reporting a major flaw in the services Google-powered search engine that has gone unnoticed until now. A simple bug was reportedly causing properties at the end of the search to be left out of displayed results entirely, thereby condemning them to vacancy purgatory, never to be seen or rented again. Airbnb's Google-centric developement and tech support centers have no way of communicating with each other, but if they did, they would know that some people use web browsers other than Chrome. In this case, the only users that remain affected by this glitch are those that use Windows Explorer or Edge. Still, the damage has been done. Most Hosts probably didn't notice since they weren't at the end of the search results, but new Hosts and lesser ranked listings didn't even get off the floor, so to speak. AIRBNB can't say when or if the problem will be fixed,  much less acknowledge that it exists. 

[Branka-and-Silvia0]

Hm... how did you find it out?

New users are ususally not on the end of a search , in contrary. And as far as I know every search will show max 300 listings and if there is more of them in the area then they will not be shown until you zoom in the map

[Michael2317]

Great question. I listed my property two months ago. I'm in a small rural community in the Eastern Sierra near Death Valley. Our area has 30 active listings, but viewing the results in the Edge browser only displays 28. Therefore, two are missing.  I tested in both Edge and Chrome and a fellow Host tested in Explorer. We also saw the issue in Chrome but there may be a new interface that resolves the problem. I became concerned that I have only received one reservation in two months and my 30 day view count is well below comparable properties in the search area.   

[Henley0]

Care to share the exact search phrase and the listings that are missing from that search? I've built programs to crawl Airbnb's search results for data so I'm pretty familiar with how their search functionality works including the bugs that currently exist.

[Michael2317]

Search Ridgecrest CA. Clear filters cookies etc.. You should see 30 listings in Chrome web or Android browsers. The same search in IE or edge returns 28 visible records in seven rows of four listings each. Two are missing. Confirmed multiple times on multiple computers. 

[Henley0]

I took a look into it. It's a layout issue in their CSS styles, not a browser specific issue.

All 30 listing's data are getting sent back to the browser regardless of what browser you're using. When the data is received, the size of your browser window may omit the last 2 results. Play around with the size of your window, and it'll show. You can try reporting that to Airbnb.

[Henley0]

[Michael2317]

When the map Toggle button is turned "on" then 30 results are displayed on two pages. My description to them was that the unfilled row was truncated. 

[Michael2317]

You are correct. I didn't see that. Changing the size of the window from maximized to variable will display all 30 in two columns or 28 in four columns. That's all I can test on my notebook so the bottom line is that the last 2 listings in the search aren't displayed. 

A redesigned search page might be coming that will fix the display grid problem. It's visible on Chrome and the filter box is on the left side of the screen with Map and List boxes instead of a toggle switch.

[Michael2317]

Thank you for testing this Henley. I'll forward as a bug report.