When go to airbnb and type in a town, it puts you on the landing page with experiences/homes/homes with filters/restaurants.
Looking at the homes, it shows 5-8 listings (ones that you would expect to be featured, lots of good reviews/booked steady, etc). When you click on “show all”, most of those homes disappear down the search results. Some do not show at all, while others are on page 15 or whatever.
I started noticing this last fall, and at the time it would happen sporadically. Meaning sometimes I would search and the listings would all appear in the same general order that they have for years in my town. Small variation, but roughly the same. And the featured homes on the landing page would should up on page 1 when you clicked on “show all”. And then I would close out my browser and reopen and search again and it would malfunction. Mixing up the homes and not giving any weight to the usual search algorithm parameters.
In the last month or two, it went from sporadic to constant. Check it in your home town and you will notice the same problem.
I have contacted airbnb 20 times over the last 4 months but to no avail. Had multiple managers find the problem themselves and send a note to IT, but each time it would get lost in translation and IT wouldn’t find the problem (in large part because they would confuse that I wasn’t referring to not being able to find my personal listing but rather the glitch in general outside of my own listing). I have been given multiple excuses for what is happening: the most recent being that the “featured homes” on the landing page are not supposed to show up when you click “show all” because they have already been shown. Which makes no sense because you can go straight to the list of homes from the initial search and skip the landing page and thus never see those featured homes. But most of the explanations center around “multiple factors affecting search placement and we can’t guarantee where every listing will show”. yeah yeah yeah, get that. The issue is that the search algorithm as all of us know it does not appear to be functioning the same way it has for years. And not just a minor change, this is completely off.