eBay

speed_racer · ‎03-30-2018

I've found that sometime in the last few days or weeks, eBay has changed their saved search algorithm and rendered some new saved searches useless. Specifically, it's now impossible to exclude terms. For example, if you want to search for balls that aren't rubber, you would type in "ball -rubber". If you use advanced search instead and put rubber in "exclude words from your search", it formats it the same way for you. I just tested it with those terms and came up with 4 million results. But when you save searches now, they change the syntax on all new saved searches to replace any spaces between the terms with a +. That works fine if you aren't excluding anything, but now this test search is saved as "ball+-rubber", which returns 1000 seemingly random results of rubber balls and other rubber items! Try it yourself and see how nonsensical it is.

I've unsaved and resaved my recent searches multiple times and they keep changing them to useless searches. Try to use a new saved search with an excluded term and you'll get no results even when clicking on "view items" because the search is wrong! You have to manually change the search back to see anything, but this means you'll never get any emails about new items. Older searches are unaffected. So if you've recently saved any new searches, don't expect to get notifications of new items.

eBay's programmers have no idea they're doing.

mudshark61369 · ‎03-31-2018

@speed_racer,

It would seem that entering (-) rubber then trying to exclude the whole term is why you're getting the results you have been. (sort of a double negative) If you exclude the minus sign as well as the word rubber, you are telling a computer you want to see results for rubber balls.

Not knowing what exactly it is you are actually searching for, its hard to tell you how to set up your search to get more relevant results. If you are looking for hollow plastic balls, there is no need to mention "rubber" at all. If what you are searching for is a specific use ball "golf, volley, soccer, beach, whiffle etc. That should be in your search title. If what you want is a solid ball made of some materia,l use that in your title Ex: "solid wood ball 2" diameter".

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FOOLPROOF, BECAUSE FOOLS ARE SO DARNED INGENIOUS!" (unknown)

speed_racer · ‎03-31-2018

Mudshark, that's the whole point. If you exclude something, eBay now changes the saved search into something that's neither here nor there. It's not the search you tried to save, in my test, "ball -rubber," nor is it "ball rubber" as you claim it is, which would have far more than 1000 results, don't you think? Try it out before calling me stupid. Make an exclusionary search. Look at the results. Save the search. Click on view items and see if the results are anything like you just tried to save. I guarantee it's not the search you manually ran. Your examples don't exclude anything. I'd rather try to exclude the one or two things I don't want than to try to include every single variation I can think of.

I know how to use Booleans in searches. I work in the computer field and have written more than my share of database queries. I have a ton of previous saved searches that work fine with excluded terms. The ones I added in the last few days are formatted differently AND THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX THEM because of the new way eBay saves searches. Maybe I'm not as foolish as you think.

ms.piercing · ‎03-31-2018

Just my 2 cents.

The Web Urls (stndard) do not allow spaces so they have been encoded with "+" character when needed.

So i guess one of the eBay's greatest IT assests now Url encoding the searche's terms. But forgeting properly decode it when they are actually doing search.

That is how you end up with + character instead of space.

Hail, eBay's IT and QA department. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

mudshark61369 · ‎04-01-2018

@speed_racer,

I did not call you stupid or foolish. I merely replied based on the information you wrote,

"ball -rubber", which i read as ball minus rubber. I suggested alternatives based on my search experiences. Some things I have searched for, give many mixed or irrelevent results, whether using the various Advanced features or by the general method.

Again, without you being more specific about what it is you are searching for, trying to assist you is more difficult.

"THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FOOLPROOF, BECAUSE FOOLS ARE SO DARNED INGENIOUS!" (unknown)

speed_racer · ‎04-01-2018

@mudshark61369wrote:
@speed_racer,

I did not call you stupid or foolish. I merely replied based on the information you wrote,
"ball -rubber", which i read as ball minus rubber. I suggested alternatives based on my search experiences. Some things I have searched for, give many mixed or irrelevent results, whether using the various Advanced features or by the general method.
Again, without you being more specific about what it is you are searching for, trying to assist you is more difficult.

That was an example. Maybe if you spent less time on these forums and actually tried a search with an exclusion, you'd see what I'm talking about. Did you try one? I'm 100% sure you haven't because you don't understand at all. My searches work when they're done manually. The exact same searches don't work once they're saved. THAT'S the point. Not that they don't ever work, as you assume.

Your "alternatives" are anything but. Say I wanted a long sleeve men's shirt. Many sellers don't put "long sleeve" in their auction, so include that in your search and you'd miss out. It's much easier to exclude "short" to block short sleeves. And if I wanted to search more than just in the "men's apparel" category, for instance, in the "sporting goods" category as well, it can't be done in one search, because searching all categories would bring up shirts for women, children, boys, girls, ladies, etc. You could include "mens," which I'm sure you personally would, but again, many sellers don't put that in their titles, so you'd miss all those results. There's a lot more to Boolean logic than just an "and" condition.

speed_racer · ‎04-01-2018

@ms.piercingwrote:
Just my 2 cents.
The Web Urls (stndard) do not allow spaces so they have been encoded with "+" character when needed.
So i guess one of the eBay's greatest IT assests now Url encoding the searche's terms. But forgeting properly decode it when they are actually doing search.

That is how you end up with + character instead of space.

Hail, eBay's IT and QA department. Hopefully they will fix it soon.

Comparing my old (working) and new (broken) searches, I can see the difference. The old searches replaced spaces with the + ASCII character between search terms. The new ones instead use %2B, the hex encoding for +. That's what's breaking it. If I manually change the URL to substitute the ASCII for the hex, the search gives me the proper results. But there's no way to save it the old way in the eBay system. We can only take whatever eBay saves for us.

I don't think eBay's "brilliant" coders tested the change before making it live. And no, I do not have any confidence that eBay will fix this. How many years have we had to suffer with mixed ending times on the site? On the watchlist, it's Pacific Time only. On every other page, it's local time. If they can't figure that out, they're not going to fix the searches.

speed_racer · ‎04-21-2018

After more than three weeks, they've finally fixed the problem. The URLs are no longer percent encoded, which meant no email results were sent. Then that was fixed, but clicking on "view items" on the saved searches page gave the same problem of no results because of the included + signs. Now those same searches, unaltered since before the problem first appeared, are producing proper results again when I view items from the saved searches page, since the + signs are gone. So much for the know-it-all who shall not be named who insisted this was all because I don't know what I'm doing when creating searches.

speed_racer · ‎04-21-2018

Grrr. Spoke too soon. It's still an ongoing problem with newly saved searches. Say you wanted a 6TB hard drive but not a surveillance model, which is not recommended for general PC use. "6tb -surveillance" shows me over 1500 results. Saved the search. But the search terms on that exact saved search now say "6tb+-surveillance" and clicking view items produces 33 results. Really, eBay? Nice coding.

berserkerplanet · ‎04-21-2018

Read the million other threads discussing this. It is broken, eBay says they are working on it, and there is a workaround.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Plus-signs-between-words-in-quot-Search-quot/m-p/2838...

Construct your search this way it will still work even after being mangled as a saved search:
6tb -(surveillance) drive produces 1456 results
as a saved search gets turned into
6tb+ -(surveillance) +drive which still produces 1456 results.

(6tb) -(surveillance) (drive) or 6tb (drive) -(surveillance) or -surveillance (6tb) drive also work.

The first term never needs any ( ) [unless it's an OR construct like (router,modem,fluxcapacitor]
A term with an exclusion minus sign - in front should have ( ) around it unless it is the first term.
Only every other term needs ( ) around it [unless it's an exclusion construct like -surveillance with a leading - sign]

Easiest thing to do is just wrap all the terms in () to make it simpler.

jammoakko · ‎04-27-2018

None of my 'saved search notifications' have worked for about a month. I have saved money by not buying anything though LOL. Apparently other many other people are suffering with the same problem! I have spoken to the help chat-line (Ebay can't be contacted by e-mail!) They have no idea what is causing the problem and have esculated it to the Tech. dept. Others report the same thing but no resolution as yet! It must be causing lots of lost sales to sellers and lost revenue to Ebay. After reading this thread, I am starting to wonder if this is a deliberate Ebay policy... because I have noticed an increase in unrequested notification about new items I have no interest in! Are Ebay trying to steer us onto other 'new' products from retailers rather than 'one off' used items. Perhaps Ebay is trying to quitely drop used sales and become just a pervaour of new retail items! Makes you think?

d-k_treasures · ‎04-27-2018

@berserkerplanet wrote:
Read the million other threads discussing this. It is broken, eBay says they are working on it, and there is a workaround.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Plus-signs-between-words-in-quot-Search-quot/m-p/2838...

Construct your search this way it will still work even after being mangled as a saved search:
6tb -(surveillance) drive produces 1456 results
as a saved search gets turned into
6tb+ -(surveillance) +drive which still produces 1456 results.

(6tb) -(surveillance) (drive) or 6tb (drive) -(surveillance) or -surveillance (6tb) drive also work.

The first term never needs any ( ) [unless it's an OR construct like (router,modem,fluxcapacitor]
A term with an exclusion minus sign - in front should have ( ) around it unless it is the first term.
Only every other term needs ( ) around it [unless it's an exclusion construct like -surveillance with a leading - sign]

Easiest thing to do is just wrap all the terms in () to make it simpler.

6TB (-surveillance) hard drive

should save and work correctly.

_____________________________
"Nothing is obvious to the oblivious"

berserkerplanet · ‎04-27-2018

►6TB (-surveillance) hard drive should save and work correctly.

I don't believe it would have, as the pattern I saw was a () wrapped term required between any other pair of terms, but moot since the bug is fixed and we can't test it any longer (so let's call it a draw and say I win?

)