Searches won't stay in same category

[jnwrx1]

Why is it any time there is an update some basic feature just stops working.

This time when I try to enter a new search time it jumps back to All Categories instead of staying in the filtered category I have set.

Ebay, try making sure the basic features of your site keep working correctly and forget about worthless bells and whistles that provide no convenience at all.

[bigjim394]

Tonight, every time I attempt to search for an item I get a page saying:

TOO MANY REDIRECTS

[arisdisc]

Yeah, I made a post about this last night. It's just a few posts beneath yours.
This will never get fixed. Hardly anyone even 'reads' this 'technical issues' group threads.

[timbart824]

Amen...just another typical eBay SNAFU!!!

[mbrbkr]

I've got the same problem and complaint. It's very frustrating when you have a very specific search term in a certain category and now eBay wants to find EVERY similar item in the whole universe of items for sale on eBay! How is this a good idea for buyers or sellers? It needs a fix fast.

[joesrecordexchange]

Yeah, this is a real pain in the butt -- I have to do at least three more clicks for every item now. FIX THIS!!

[eburtonlab]

@joesrecordexchange

eBay needs to fix these search issues, but in the mean time, Firefox seems to handle these category searches better than Chrome or Edge.

See here:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Search-completely-broken/m-p/28924945/highlight/true#...

[joesrecordexchange]

Nope -- just tried Firefox and got the same result. 

[eburtonlab]

@joesrecordexchange

Searches using Firefox that were working on Saturday -- albeit on another machine -- are failing for me now. I will check my original machine when I get home, but I doubt there is anything special about it.

Perhaps eBay is making more changes? Whatever they are doing, it seems to be getting worse.

Sorry for the false hope.

[eburtonlab]

A followup to my previous post.

In Firefox (61.0.2 64-bit) on my home machine this search works, and stays in category when searching new terms. Nothing special about this machine (Windows 10 Pro 1803):

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fcid=1&_sop=10&_clu=2&gbr=1&_osacat=261&_ipg=200&_from=R40&_sacat=2...

I tried to strip out as many extra variables as possible and still have the search work. Now when I paste that into Edge and Chrome, it works there, too.

Could the problem be related to the length of the URL? Is something adding to the length of the URL until it gets too long and breaks?

[berserkerplanet]

>>Could the problem be related to the length of the URL? Is something
>>adding to the length of the URL until it gets too long and breaks?

URL length of 300+ chars works ok fine.

Only issue I have seen is when the human readable keyword string in the search box exceeds about 110 characters - which may translate to more characters in URL due to URL encoding (space=%20 ,=%2C etc). Fails the same if entered in the search box or manually embedded in the URL and search executed that way.

Results in nasty red error message: "Your query matches a large number of items. Please try searching within one of our categories."

[eburtonlab]

Back on my other computer, checking the version of Firefox causes it to update to version 62.

If I start with this basic category-limited item search page (United States Stamps) with no search terms:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fcid=1&_sop=10&_clu=2&gbr=1&_osacat=261&_ipg=200&_from=R40&_sacat=2...

And then I add a search term to the search box, say "lighthouse" and run the search, I wind up here:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313.TR10.TRC3.A0.H0.Xlighthouse.TR...

1600 or so results of lighthouse stamps. Looking at the search category, it still says "United States". So far, so good.

From here, if I enter "flag" in the search box and run the search, I get this:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313.TR10.TRC3.A0.H0.Xflag.TRS2&_nk...

which gives me 4,500,000 flag items in "All Categories", despite three references to category 261 (US Stamps) in the URL: _sacat=261 _osacat=261 and a second _osacat=261 at the end of the URL. I'm assuming _sacat refers to "search category" and _osacat refers to "originating search category" or "original search category".

Other than a few duplicated terms making for a longer URL, I don't see anything in the last two search URLs that would account for the vastly different outcomes.

I thought it might be related to implicit category search, but adding a nonsense exclusion doesn't seem to help (i.e., searching for flag -xyzxyz).

If I start by looking for "flag" and then look for "lighthouse" the result of the first search is stamps and the second dumps into "All categories".

More weirdness to come if I have time.

[eburtonlab]

I am able to reproducibly create chains of searches that stay in the same category, but only so long as there are common search keywords.

Starting with this search:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fcid=1&_sop=10&_clu=2&gbr=1&_osacat=261&_ipg=200&_from=R40&_sacat=2...

I can do the following searches by typing the search term into the search box and searching, then typing the next term on the results page search box.

alpha 

alpha bravo

alpha bravo charlie

bravo charlie

charlie

And everything stays in the United States Stamp category.

If I instead do it this way:

alpha

charlie

The second search returns to "All Categories".