“What keeps me awake at night is, ‘How do we better utilize the data and get faster insights and faster analysis?’” says Bob Page, VP, Data and Analytics Program, eBay. Dealing with a volume of data 100 times larger than the Library of Congress, it’s understandable that Page would say this.

For him, the biggest challenge in dealing with so much data is relevance – understanding and delivering the right thing for the customer. To approach this challenge, eBay tests everything before letting it go live, says Page. The company has also developed its own in-house technology as well as an experimentation system.

In the below podcast, Bob talks about some of these initiatives as well as how he and the eBay team prevent customers from getting frustrated while searching through such a massive data warehouse. When a search returns thousands of results, that could be a good thing or a very annoying thing. Surely as online shoppers yourselves, you understand.