Usually feels like
Seconds
It finishes while you are still looking at the screen.
It stays in seconds because the query is small and the answer is text, but it is the slowest thing in the band that you ask for on purpose.
The wait, in plain words
Search on this network answers once, at the end. No list narrows under your fingers as you type. No suggestions drop down. You give it a phrase, commit, and the page you were on holds still while the question travels.
That absence is not a missing feature. A box that answers while you type is asking a server on every keystroke, and here every one of those questions is a full journey along a path with several relays in it. The box that waits for you to press enter is the honest design.
The wait itself is close in length to loading an ordinary page, with a little added for the work of answering.
Underneath, while nothing moves
Two costs are stacked here and only one of them belongs to the market. Matching text against a catalogue is the sort of thing a machine does without noticing. The journey out with your query and back with a page of results is what you are actually waiting on.
That has a practical consequence for how you search. Every refinement is a fresh round trip. Narrowing by category, then by origin, then by price, then changing the sort order, is a sequence of separate journeys, each paying the full cost of the path.
Paging behaves the same way. The next page of results is not sitting in your browser waiting to be shown. It is another request, another journey, another wait of the same size. A long list read page by page costs as many round trips as it has pages.
Filters that look free are not always free. One the market can apply while it is already looking is cheap. One that makes it look again, or that makes the result page much larger, adds to both halves of the trip. See the first screen painting for why a heavy result page is worse here than elsewhere.
Behaving, and not behaving
A search that is working and a search that has stalled differ in what comes back, not in how long they take.
A query being answered
The page you were on stays put, then is replaced by a results page in one step. An empty result set is still an answer and still counts as working.
A second query behaves like the first. Consistency across different queries is what a healthy search looks like from outside.
A query that did not land
The page you were on stays put and then the browser gives up on its own. What arrives is a browser page rather than a market page.
Or a results page arrives with its structure but nothing in the list, and does so for every query you try. Nothing found for everything is not the same as nothing found for one thing.
The clean test is a query you are confident has matches. If a broad and ordinary term comes back empty, the problem is not your choice of words.
If the results page begins to arrive and then stops partway, the wait has changed shape and is described at a page that half arrived.
Safe to do meanwhile
Since each round trip is expensive, every useful habit here is about spending fewer of them.
- Ask one good question instead of several small onesSet the filters you already know you want before pressing enter, not after seeing the first page.
- Widen rather than repeatIf nothing comes back, a broader term is a better next journey than the same term typed again.
- Read the whole page before paging onThe next page costs exactly what this one cost.
- Open a promising result in another tabKeeps the results page you already paid for instead of fetching it again on the way back.
- See the rest of the bandThe other waits that end while you are still at the screen.
What makes it longer
Most of what lengthens a search here is something you asked for without noticing that you were asking for a journey.
- Sorting after the fact, which is a fresh request rather than a rearrangement of what you already hold.
- Paging deep into a long list, since every page is a full journey.
- A result page carrying thumbnails, which turns one arrival into many.
- A very broad term that matches most of the catalogue, so the answer itself is large to send.
- A market under load, where the answering is queued behind other work.
- Repeating a search that already came back empty, which spends a journey to learn the same thing twice.
What this card is not. This card is not about what a catalogue contains, only about the interval between asking and being answered.