"Left Parenthesis" now gives previous search?

[argy_eyes]

Experts,

Today I tried using parentheses as an "OR" function in a search:  "(term1, term2, term3)  blah  blah  blah . . ."

It gave me my previous search if I entered the "(" first, and ignored the parenthesis if I tried to use it later in the search field.

My wife's laptop gave the same result (she uses Safari and I use Chrome, both on Mac computers). This, and the fact that a "previous search" keystroke might be considered a useful feature, have got me thinking this may be more than some kind of compatibility bug.

Has anybody else seen this?

Thanks,

Mike

[eburtonlab]

Now it is obvious that ebay is trying to forcefully prohibit using search functions that they don't want users to use.

I doubt it is intentional; if eBay wanted to do away with Boolean searches eBay could easily do that without changing the function of the auto-fill feature.

In any case, the change does not prevent Boolean searches, it just makes them a bit harder to enter into the search field by hand. Bookmarked or Saved Boolean searches still work, and the Advanced Search page still allows parenthetical terms to by entered by hand.

More likely the current problem is an unanticipated side effect of some other unrelated code change.

[kenwardor]

Dear eBay sales prevention team, you might save a few bucks on compute power by killing off more boolean search tools, but you make it a lot harder to find things, loose millions in sales and alienate long time users. I will not waste my time culling thru a bunch of unrelated search results. It's an insult to your customer base.
What if put the customer experience first and helped sellers items get found it WILL NOT cost you money. You are cutting your nose off despite your face.
BTW, left parentheses AND quotation mark now broken.

And why the heck did you kill some super useful boolean tools (asterisk, etc.) years ago?
Oh, and have you noticed all the long time sellers whose sales dropped off? Yeah, their items are easily confused with or drown out by other similar items that now can not be efficiently excluded from the search results. A great way to tell them to f off is to not fix this. Are you too isolated in your glass tower with the accountants to know what is going on?

[kenwardor]

You might be right, but several years ago, eBay killed off several super useful (asterisk, etc.) boolean search parameters. And now it's often unpredictable when searching for a singular word as to whether results will include singular and plural. If you search "thing", eBay might miss "things", so it's necessary to search (thing,things) to not miss items, which is now broken. One would now need to save a singular and plural search or use the workaround(s) that few know of.
Given the history of eBay doing dumb things, I'll not be surprised that they are penny pinching compute time at the expense of quality results.

[its_a_zen_thing]

I understand that wildcards loaded the database servers heavily, which is unfortunate because they did enable powerful searches for those of us who made use of them. I think the new problem is unintentional - it's changed since yesterday so open-parenthesis is just impossible to type, instead of opening search suggestions.

[its_a_zen_thing]

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@mudshark61369 wrote:

@its_a_zen_thing,

It may work better on ebay's U.K. site

That's another fun feature - I'll be doing my usual stuff on ebay.co.uk and occasionally I'll be shunted over to ebay.com for no obvious reason.

[argy_eyes]

@its_a_zen_thing @kenwardor @eburtonlab @bambopbam @bulldogsandspiders (and everybody else)

Today I had to reboot my desktop from power-off. The first thing I did was to try the left-paren (Boolean OR) search and it worked.    So at least today, on my rebooted system, the problem is gone. Someone at eBay fixed it (thank you!) or it was the reboot (which of course would not explain others' observations starting yesterday).

Completely unrelated: now the "accept as solution" button is labeled "Best Answer" ?

Mike

[midmo]

Wow, that's crazy to me. I actually opened a support chat yesterday to report the issue. I can't believe that's a choice somebody made. They're really making it tough to stick around and keep using their site. 

[its_a_zen_thing]

Working here today. I'm pretty sure it was a bug rather than a feature, but they do seem to have a habit of "improvements" that make it harder for us.