The (OR) search functions appear to be broken or glitched for me.
I'm going to reference back to a previous post from @eburtonlab on search functions, this link explains how they work. https://community.ebay.com/t5/Buying/How-to-use-Boolean-operators-in-ebay-search/td-p/29941476
Here's the problem I ran into. If I search completed listings with the following: violator darklands army
There is one single completed result that ended Sept 3rd.
However, if I change that search result to something like (violator darklands army,sabra bladefire)
I should still have that one result in completed, but it isn't there.
Instead it returns 0 results.
What is causing this search to fail? It should still return the 1 result, regardless of the other "OR" search not returning anything.
I thought perhaps this was an issue where only completed items were affected, so I tried something different with active listings. Now I search just active listings for: Sabra Bladefire.
I get two item results, one in the USA, one in Italy.
I change the search to (Sabra Bladefire,violator darklands army)
Now I only get 1 result, and the USA listing disappears.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason to how this is functioning.
Is anyone able to figure this out?
I'm going through the trouble of all this because I want to put multiple things in a single search that will alert me when a new listing is found, instead of creating 20+ different dedicated search alerts.
eburtonlab
·2 years agoI believe that the difference in your searches is due to how those Boolean OR searches work with spaces inside parentheses.
Normally when using spaces to separate keywords in a search, spaces are interpreted as a Boolean AND: each keyword must appear in the title or item-specifics of each returned result. So your individual search for violator darklands army winds up being interpreted by eBay as violator AND darklands AND army in any order.
But using parentheses to perform a Boolean OR search changes how spaces are interpreted inside the parentheses. Instead of returning results that contain all of those keywords, your search will return results that contain those keywords in that exact order, without any intervening keywords. So the following term (violator darklands army,sabra bladefire) is actually interpreted by eBay as "violator darklands army" OR "sabra bladefire" instead of [violator AND darklands AND army] OR [sabra AND bladefire] as you intend.
Try this search to search for both items at the same time:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=%28violator%2Csabra%29+%28darklands+army%2CSabra+Bladefire%29&_sacat=0&_sop=10
Switching between active and completed items shows one of each item for me.
any$4forsberg
OP2 years agoWhat a speedy response! Didn't think tagging you would work so easily but I appreciate it, I see now how it effectively acts as if they are in quotes. I guess one way to avoid this is to use no spaces, though if I have a list of about 10 or so items I'm looking for at once, it's going to be difficult to make sure each one word in the first pair of parentheses will match up with just one word in the second pair of parentheses. I'll have to give it some more thought and rethink the approach. Thanks
edit; if I change your string to (violator,sabra) (darklands,Bladefire)
I can get both usa/italy results for the sabra card to appear. Luckily these are such obscure card names that it's not pulling hundreds of other listings. If I shorten them down to very specific words I can probably get it to work out.
eburtonlab
·2 years agoYou are very welcome!
Yes, it quickly becomes very complicated to search for multiple sets of keywords using the Boolean OR when those keywords are phrases that can appear in different orders. If your keywords are unique enough it can work, but quickly gets overwhelming with longer phrases unless, like book titles, they always appear in an exact order.
It may help to determine which words are likely to appear in exact order (darklands-army) and which can appear out of order (violator).