eBay

svsonsie · ‎03-20-2018

When I enter sveral words in the Search Box Ebay's search engine has started inserting the plus sign (+) between the words (example: beer+goblets+glasses). With the plus sign between words it will not do a complete search so I have to manually delete the +'s. It never used to do that and it just started a couple of days ago. How do I get it to stop doing that? It's driving me crazy.

long-draw · ‎04-11-2018

Tyler, **bleep**??? How come no fix? How come no status update?? Does eBay really not understand that this cuts down on purchases, which cuts down on revenue? Run this up the management chain until someone realizes that it's a big hairy deal.

steve5486 · ‎04-13-2018

April 13, 2018 - Saved Searches are still messed up (adding plus signs ).

steve5486 · ‎04-13-2018

I found that enclosing the search terms in brackets results in a working saved search.

For example, (gingery)(coil)(winding)(machine).

The plus signs still get added, but the search works.

microshnik · ‎04-13-2018

CONFIRMED this also works for term exclusion, but it does not help with seller in/exclusion.

microshnik · ‎04-13-2018

Who knew there was a time limit for editing one of these posts! So I continue my thought...

It also significantly reduces the possible length of a search. I'm *constantly* bumping up against the length limit because the removal of wildcards way back when has forced me to use insane numbers of exclusion terms. Thankfully, the saved searches I broke due to this bug don't have very many of those, so this work-around has fixed them. 🙂

The other half of the issue: eBay defaults to space-separating the list of sellers to include or exclude, and if you try to use commas instead (which they do allow), it converts them to spaces. If you feel like futzing with the URL to force the issue, you can replace each seller separator (be it a literal space, a plus sign, or the encoded %20 or %2B) with the encoding for a comma, %2C, and then saving the search *will* preserve the commas!

Many thanks to @steve5486 for the work-around and the inspiration to find the seller list fix! My saved searches have been saved! 😄

domo5547 · ‎04-15-2018

Gotta love IT techs who make changes and do not test what it does. this is still happening as of today 4/15/18. Two different threads and over 100 messages, you would think they would have fixed it by now

darksidewookie · ‎04-17-2018

Same thing here. Very annoying.

commander.shepard · ‎04-17-2018

It's a shame most of my searches need the parentheses for multiple "OR" groups, and so the workaround won't work for me.

kingston (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm") etc.

microshnik · ‎04-17-2018

If you split the exclusion group into its component terms, it should work fine, because NOT(a OR b) is logically equivalent to NOT(a) AND NOT(b). So your example would become:

kingston (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") (-sodimm) (-fbdimm) (-"fb-dimm")

The biggest problem is that you're more likely to hit the search string length limit that way.

domo5547 · ‎04-17-2018

STILL HAPPENING!! (I thought if I yell maybe they will hear lol)

jrace3bigd · ‎04-17-2018

Same problem here, I wrote about it the other day thinking that I had something wrong,
tried switching browsers and deleting things but to no avail !!!
Thanks again Ebay for jacking something up when you don't need to.
I have asked Ebay to quit messing with things but no they still screw with it.
No they don't listen to anyone either.
Thank you Ebay you have messed us up again!! Nice Job.

microshnik · ‎04-17-2018

Hey tyler@ebay, if I tell you where the bad encoding is, do you think that will speed up the process of getting this fixed? I've narrowed it down to a particular line of JS that's apparently generated server side as part of the body of a search page. Obviously I can't tell you what file in eBay's code to look in, but I sure can give your devs enough information to find it. How 'bout it??

berserkerplanet · ‎04-17-2018

The bug doesn't affect the specific example search posted above - exactly same number results for original search and for messed up version after a saved search.

Parentheses used for OR groupings seem to guard against the added plus signs affecting the search, and you had only one un-parenthesized term.

original: kingston (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
mangled: kingston+ (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")

Put all your single terms in a set of parentheses also and you should have no problems until it gets fixed.

If we add another singular term ECC to the end:
     kingston (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm") ECC
the saved search gets mangled to
    kingston+ (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm") +ecc
but works fine and produces same number of results.

It appears that the bug only chains two or more single search terms directly together with no buffering spaces when they are adjacent, and that is what causes the searches to fail.

if we do this search with the added singular term at the front
     kingston ECC (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
we get 365results and the saved search gets mangled to
    kingston+ecc+ (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
and produces only 1 result because it stuck kingston and ECC together.

IF we wrap the second singular term in ()
kingston (ECC) (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
we get our 365 results, and the mangled saved search looking like
kingston+ (ecc) + (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
and producing the same 265 results

If we wrap all the singular terms in ()
   (kingston) (ECC) (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
we get 365 results and mangled version
   (kingston) + (ecc) + (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
also produces 365 results

Note that the glitch also adds + signs where there are spaces inside the parentheses, but they don't seem to have any effect on the search. If you replace any spaces inside any parentheses with %20 (url encoded representation of a space char) before saving the search no plus signs are added.

However, when you view or edit the search, the %20's are changed back to space chars, and if not changed to %20 again before saving changes will cause the plus signs to be added again. Changing spaces to %20 outside of parentheses (between single search terms causes a search failure, so don't do that.

This search
(kingston) (ECC) (ram,dimm,udimm) ("8gb","8%20gb","4x2gb","4%20x%202gb","4x%202gb") -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
ends up looking like this after being saved and viewed again
(kingston) + (ecc) + (ram,dimm,udimm) + ("8gb","8 gb","4x2gb","4 x 2gb","4x 2gb") + -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")
but if saved again without manually changing the spaces back to %20 ends up looking like this
   (kingston) +++ (ecc) +++ (ram,dimm,udimm) +++ ("8gb","8+gb","4x2gb","4+x+2gb","4x+2gb") +++ -(sodimm,fbdimm,"fb-dimm")

Extra + signs get added in on each save (edit these out as you go along), and the ones inside the () get added back again because I didn't change the spaces to %20 again. Note that those added + sign don't affect the search - just visually annoying.

Editing the spaces inside () to %20 every time could get annoying if you modify your searches a lot, but the method works great for to have a one time set-and-forget search look right when the search terms are viewed.

Summary:
Wrap any more than one singular search term in parentheses or make sure there are parentheses wrapped term(s) in between any singular terms. Although the bug will add plus signs when the search is saved, it adds spaces around them and they don't affect the search.

Example:    router wireless (linksys,netgear) -broken
would not work well after beings saved as a search as   router wireless would get changed to router+wireless and fail.

Any of these variations will work:
(router) (wireless) (linksys,netgear) -(broken)
router (wireless) (linksys,netgear) -(broken)
router (linksys,netgear) -(broken) wireless
router (linksys , netgear) -broken (wireless)

As long as any two adjacent search terms are parenthesized, the saved searches will work fine (even if visually ugly with + signs embedded after saving)

bpr103 · ‎04-17-2018

That's a good temporary work around, but I rarely change saved searches and when they get around to fixing this all of the workarounds might not work.