Hi,

have to admit, I think this sucks too.

Cheers,
KAL

All I've come up with is that as they inch toward being a storefront, they expect more sellers to select what an item is, instead of describing it, so the titles could be more standardized.  In theory that would work, except for three pretty key things:

1.  There are still a ton of people who use ebay to sell only a few things, or are (comparatively) small retailers.  They don't have automated systems to post things, so typos happen.  Ebay still makes something from this group of sellers, no?  Why wouldn't they want to keep them?
2.  It totally fails for non mainstream retail goods (i.e. collectibles) as there is no standard to select from.
3.  How can it possibly handle a situation where someone is looking for a part number?  They know it's in the JK08 series, but whether it's a JX08001, JX08002, ... , JX08999 they aren't sure.  Or a television where I know I want UN32EH4000F but I didn't realize there was a color code too and it should be UN32EH4000FBLK or UN32EH4000FWHT?  To match those... they'd have to add the * behind the scenes anyway!  Or build a database/lookup table to handle all the possibilities... which is not likely not going to be faster and would definitely require more upkeep.


A lot of ebay decisions I can at least sort of understand, even if I think they're dumb.  This I really don't get.  Apparently no one else does either.  Removing a powerful tool that likely wasn't used my most of the community, but was essential to those who did use it?  No clue.  It really bugs me as a computer professional - regular expressions are incredibly powerful and critical tools.

I've been looking at ebay's forums, and tipped off a couple tech blogs (techcrunch, mashable) to see if they have interest in investigating.  Probably not, but it only took a minute.

Badmike wrote:It's simple. The wider your net is, the more listings you have to wade through, which increases visibility.  They've been doing a form of this for years with their "Are you sure you meant "X"?  Here is "Y" instead in case you meant Y" bullshit. Having you find something faster means less time spent on the site.

Precisely.  eBay is figuring out the same sort of thing that Google has -- they really don't like targeted searches that get the searcher exactly what he/she wants.  They'd much rather you browse, because it increases exposure.  The next step, I would guess, is to prevent you from searching descriptions, only titles.  They've already done this for completed auction searches.

Foul

Whatever they're doing, they needed to do something. In recent months if I enter something like "dungeons dragons" I get everything with the initials " A. D. D.," such as computer batteries.

It makes it harder to find something that has been accidentally put in the wrong category, since at least for me I immediately start limiting categories just to get the amount of items manageable.

Mike B.

Ref to search tips, how do i exclude an ID from any search i want to perform? I am getting more and more annoyed by the tons of stuff listed everyday by KN... thanks!

Great, thanks a lot!
ciaooo