Ebay search character limit seems to have been reduced again to about 105.

[ebuy_8178]

Today I had a problem using a long search.  I found out the character limit  may have been reduced to around 105 characters.  You can test this easily by adding words to your search with negative filtration like this.  Put a space betweeh iPhone and the dash.  Then experiment by adding letters within the brackets to see when it gives you the red warning message: "Let's try that again. This time add more details so we can search for better matches."

iphone -(sdflsdkfjsldfkjsdlfksjdflskjdfslkdfjsldfkjsdlfkjsdkdfjslkjflkjsld;kklkfjsldfkjslkfjsdlfkjsldkfl)

If I remove one character it gives me 13,739,873 results.

Copy and paste the search string into a word processor and have the Status Bar displayed and it should tell you how many characters you have.  You may have to highlight it.  LibreOffice, Notepad++ and Microsoft Word all work well.  Wordpad, Notepad and Jarte don't.  They're too basic.

[pburn]

Perhaps if you enter your search terms into a Google search field, you could come up with reasonable alternatives for your product and shop from there.

If you can't describe the item you're looking for in 105 characters, you're being too specific or designing your search inappropriately. It's an online retail website. It's not designed to find the one listing that meets all your criteria or to eliminate every single feature you aren't interested in.

This criticism is just so esoteric as to be easily dismissed by the vast majority of buyers who search on this or any other online retail site.

[eburtonlab]

I wonder if this is related to the problems with search filters I have been seeing lately.

I am seeing a lot of posts lately about problems with search filters no longer working. Some involve saved searches that have previously been working, others seem to not work when searching a seller's other items. Search filter options appear on the search results page, but when selected, do not actually limit the results as they have in the past.

[ebuy_8178]

We so need another website that would take over from where Ebay used to be.  Focusing on used items only.  As if we need a place to buy new items.  There's about a billion out there to choose from.  What we need is basically a search engine that works geographically and calculates shipping charges for the customer automatically encompassing Ebay, Amazon's used items, Craigslist, Kijiji, FB Marketplace and others.  Some people don't need things overnight.  Like 99.9% of the population.  Heavy, large items can't be shipped.  Lighter, smaller items can easily be shipped.  All these things need to be taken into consideration.  Nobody is going to buy something for $10 when its $25 new, then incur a $20 shipping fee.  Then again our whole transportation system is a mess.  Door to door delivery needs to be scrapped.  We need pickup depots scattered across the city that would accept deliveries from every shipping company.  Much of this could be automated.  That is the future.  Door to door is the biggest waste of energy and resources imaginable.  Its time we woke up to shipping efficiency.  We all need to recycle shipping materials much better. 

[kh-ornesh]

Hi everyone,

Due to the length of time that has passed since this thread began, we have locked it from future replies. If this is still an issue that warrants discussion, don't hesitate to begin a new thread HERE.

Thanks.

[ebuy_8178]

What is the point of locking an ongoing question?  What good does it do? 

[simba6]

Searches like that place a big load on the servers.  The same reason the wild card search was done away with. 

[ebuy_8178]

That doesn't makes sense.  Hard drive space is way cheaper than it ever was.   CPU's are way faster and more efficient than they ever were.  They allowed it for years in the past when it was way more expensive to implement. 

[eburtonlab]

I doubt that someone at eBay decided to lower the limit of the number of characters in a search field as an explicit cost saving measure.

More likely some piece of code was rewritten to work with the latest software on a new server as part of an update, and the limit was altered as a side effect of another change.

Note that there are different limits that can come into play: limits on the total number of characters in the search field, and limits on the number of characters in a page URL that can be effectively evaluated by eBay's servers.

The latter limitation can be trickier to deal with since the number of characters in a given search URL can depend on many factors, including the search keywords and parameters from the previous search. A search that works in one context may fail in another, due to the variable length of the page address, and parameters after a certain point may not be evaluated properly.

If you have ever had a large search work initially, but fail when trying to navigate to page two, that may have been the limit you were running into.

Although I just tested this again, and it appears that eBay has made some changes to the way that search URLs are generated when navigating between pages. So perhaps some formerly problematic searches will work again.

[ebuy_8178]

Good answer.  One of the most balanced responses I've ever read.  And you did make some valid points.  Especially the resulting length of the URL which might be difficult to control though its hard to imagine a powerful server not being able to handle almost any length of URL but what do I know about web design and servers?  Absolutely nothing!  So thank you for taking the time.  Hopefully they will wake up and make this work properly.  But I notice more and more they are adapting things that Amazon does that drive us to Ebay.  Its sad to see.  Hopefully a search engine will emerge that will search all for sale sites so we can actually find things we are looking for at the price we are willing to pay. 

[downunder-61]

@kh-ornesh 

Yo, you forgot to lock it 😁

[ebuy_8178]

"Lock it"?  What does that mean? 

[eburtonlab]

"Lock it"? What does that mean?

See message #5.

A moderator indicated that this thread was being locked to prevent new replies due to the age of the thread, but the thread was not actually locked, as you can see by all the replies following that message.