01-27-2023 08:20 AM
For some years I've had a standing search saved for "Coronation" in the category silver, and it consistently returns a dozen or more items daily – mostly pieces in the silverplate pattern Coronation, but also others. Since Monday, I have not gotten a single email on that search, and when I run it from my saved searches it returns only a handful of items – none of them from that silverplate pattern, all of them old listings (that is, from last year). Same if I manually enter that search, or even broaden the category. But if I search "Coronation silverplate" in "all categories", there are lots there (and listed in the silver > silverplate category). Of course that doesn't return sterling coronation pieces, just the Oneida/Community pattern. My other saved searches seem to be working normally.
01-27-2023 11:47 AM
If a search suddenly starts behaving badly, often the problem has something to do with a faulty keyword substitution or an inappropriate automatic category navigation issue.
You can bypass many of these sorts of issues by putting one of your keywords in quotes -- this forces eBay to search for the literal keywords without any substitution or category switching. You may have to manually specify your category once again.
Try this as a starting point, then narrow down as necessary and save a new search:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%22coronation%22&_sacat=20096&LH_TitleDesc=0&_fsrp=1
01-30-2023 03:19 PM
That works, thanks. I also found that adding silverplate (or silver) to the search brought up the listings, even though coronation without one of those words didn't. Really bizarre search behavior!
01-30-2023 03:54 PM
You are most welcome.
I think that eBay's "smart" search sometimes inappropriately groups keywords together or treats multiple keywords as a unique single keyword, and this can sometimes lead to odd search behavior where listings with certain keywords that should be returned by a search do not appear as they should.
But that is just my guess about what is happening based on running lots of searches.
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