eBay saved searches have become complete noise 5 5

[Sweet Lou 14]

Small update:

• I can confirm that "defenders 5" in a search will not miss "Defenders #5" in the listing title.  Thanks for pointing that out.
• I have converted a handful of my searches to the more verbose format suggested above, which should dramatically reduce the false positives for those searches.  Will consider chipping away at more of them depending on what lands in my inbox.

I appreciate all of the responses and hope this thread was helpful to more people than just me.

[Gaard]

On 7/13/2022 at 12:28 PM, Sweet Lou 14 said:

I don't know when exactly it happened -- I started to notice a few months ago -- but at some point this year it seems that eBay has completely loosened the matching rules for searches, resulting in massive amounts of "false" matches.  It's driving me nuts and rendering my daily saved-search alert emails borderline useless.

It used to be that keywords in a search would match only against the listing title, but now I'm getting matches against metadata in the listing that's completely unrelated to the item being offered, and designed to trick the search engine.

Let's take a quick example.  I search for:

"defenders" 5 cgc 9.6

Normally I wouldn't use quotes around a single word -- what's the point, right?  But I tried quotes to see if they would cause an exact match on listing title only, and clearly they don't.

Now let's look at some of the bogus matches.  First, there are matches like this one:

Defenders 47 CGC 9.6 White Early Moon Knight Cover 1st Crossover Marvel 5/77

OK, at least I can understand this.  I wish that eBay wouldn't consider "5/77" to be a match for the number 5, and I haven't been able to figure out a way to cull those out of my search results, but I can live with it.

Next there are a whole bunch of matches that look like this one:

New Mutants 5 CGC 9.6 Joshua Middleton Cover Nunizo Defilippis Story 2003 WP

The word "defenders" doesn't appear anywhere in the listing title, and therefore I would never want this listing to show up in my search results.  And what I really want is for this listing to never generate an alert email that I have to click on only to realize that eBay is sending me garbage.

So, why is eBay showing me this book?  The answer seems to be in the "Item specifics" metadata within the listing:

Obviously this listing has been gamed so that it will match against all sorts of stuff.  Yeah, I'm sure someone looking for Batman or Archie would love to see this New Mutants book in their search results.  

Does anyone know of a way to do a search that matches only against the listing title, so that I can avoid getting all this junk in my inbox?

I feel your pain. At least half of those emails I get from my saved searches show me stuff that I have no interest in. I know I'm missing out on books that I want because I skip over so many of those emails thinking "They're just going to show me crap again".

[Sweet Lou 14]

I thought this thread was going to quietly fade into the background but since it's been brought back, I'll share a book that I bought just yesterday thanks to my saved searches:

[Lightning55]

Nice pick up.  Depending on price, of course.  But I bet you got a deal.

I still pick up a few things through Saved Searches, but it's harder than it used to be.  You really have to refine the search. 

Sometimes, instead of doing something like Defenders (5,7) to get either issue, it is better to have 2 separate searches reporting.  Keeps it simpler for the search process. On the long string of Hulk, yeah, doing that would be a headache.

[Sweet Lou 14]

On 7/30/2022 at 3:14 PM, Lightning55 said:

Nice pick up.  Depending on price, of course.  But I bet you got a deal.

I still pick up a few things through Saved Searches, but it's harder than it used to be.  You really have to refine the search. 

Sometimes, instead of doing something like Defenders (5,7) to get either issue, it is better to have 2 separate searches reporting.  Keeps it simpler for the search process. On the long string of Hulk, yeah, doing that would be a headache.

Thanks!  It came up for $275 which I thought was a fair price, but it also had that Make an Offer button so I couldn't resist.  Submitted my offer of $250 and held my breath because there's always a chance someone else will pounce.  Thankfully the offer was accepted!

I ended up putting in the time (somewhere between 1-2 hours while watching TV) to break up most of my searches into that "hulk 103","hulk 104" style that was recommended above.  Junk results have diminished drastically, so I'm happy.  

[Aman619]

You can create these long search strings using concatenate In excel.  Enter a title and a list of issue numbers to search for, and build a formula to create the search sentence.

= “(“ & “A1” & “ ‘ & B1 & “) “.  Etc etc.

This returns :   ‘(Batman 65) ‘. When A1 is Batman and B1 is 65

youll have to create a formula for each amount of issues to look for to avoid incomplete listings for cells without an issue number.  But over time, automating this down to titles and issue numbers you are seeking would be worth the trouble.  Why not let the computers work for us!  We will be working for them soon enough!

Edited July 31, 2022 by Aman619

[Aman619]

Im working on this too to fine tune my worthlessly vague saved searches too!

[Aman619]

I played around with this and realized that theres a character limit to each search string.  so keep the titles short with a long string of issues, or the search fails because thee ends got cut off when pasting it in the search box.  And very important to add a lot of exclude terms too, depending on how common the title is,  Like say "Batman 6" will find all issue 6s of ALL Batman titles.  Lots of caveats like that, if Im doing it right?

[Mr. Zipper]

Speaking of saved searches...

How many have saved searches for years and the searches have an item that keeps coming up that has been unsold for many years? I have been tempted to buy it and destroy simply so I never had to see it again. 

I wish there was a way to click on a specific item and exclude it going forward.

[Mr. Zipper]

On 7/31/2022 at 7:31 PM, Aman619 said:

I played around with this and realized that theres a character limit to each search string.  so keep the titles short with a long string of issues, or the search fails because thee ends got cut off when pasting it in the search box.  And very important to add a lot of exclude terms too, depending on how common the title is,  Like say "Batman 6" will find all issue 6s of ALL Batman titles.  Lots of caveats like that, if Im doing it right?

The old ebay search was much more powerful. It was longer, which allowed the space for more fine tuning like excluding certain words, etc. A typical add on I used was "-(CGG, PGX)"  

I guess all those long automated searches were taking up too much horsepower at ebay. 

[Mr. Zipper]

On 8/1/2022 at 12:57 PM, King Farce said:

Comic title -cgc -cbcs seems to still work, no?

Yes that’ll still work, but what I’m saying is because they shortened the characters in the search you typically don’t have the space to fine-tune anymore. You might get title and issue numbers but then run out of space before you can add other qualifiers. 

[Lightning55]

On 8/1/2022 at 11:33 AM, Mr. Zipper said:

Speaking of saved searches...

How many have saved searches for years and the searches have an item that keeps coming up that has been unsold for many years? I have been tempted to buy it and destroy simply so I never had to see it again. 

I wish there was a way to click on a specific item and exclude it going forward.

I don't think you can exclude a specific item, but pretty sure you can exclude a specific seller.  That would get rid of that item, but if they later put one of the same up that you wanted, like at a lower price, that would be excluded before you even saw it.

[AustinReece_GRRC]

I believe Conan @mycomicshop touched on this in his latest over street market report but ebay basically consolidated all of their comic categories into one or two huge categories encompassing everything. So instead of searching for "amazing spider-man 1" and getting filtered down to these categories: Collectibles-> Comic Books-> Silver Age Comics-> Amazing Spider-Man, you just have the 1st giant category of comic books + manga.

This has been a real issue for sellers as well since our listings are getting buried under results that don't actually match what you are searching for. Searching for "Amazing Spider-Man #1" brings up mostly junk even though their are plenty of Silver Age #1's available. 

I know we have been trying to include the publication year in our ebay titles to try and help people out so they can search "amazing spider-man 1 1963" and get slightly better results.

All in all, it was a system that was pretty good and didn't need to be changed.

[Lightning55]

On 8/1/2022 at 3:08 PM, AustinReece_GRRC said:

All in all, it was a system that was pretty good and didn't need to be changed.

That is the very definition of eBay.

Now it's dysfunctional and an embarrassment.

[steveinthecity]

Just thought I’d add to this, but from one saved search I regularly get a result of She-Hulk #6 CGC.  I’m not in any way looking for a She-Hulk or regular Hulk comic, nor is the number “6” included in my search.  Maybe the universe is telling me I should have this comic, but I’m wavering on whether or not that’s a reasonable conclusion  given all that I don’t know about the universe.

Edited August 1, 2022 by steveinthecity

[Aman619]

On 8/1/2022 at 1:02 PM, Mr. Zipper said:

Yes that’ll still work, but what I’m saying is because they shortened the characters in the search you typically don’t have the space to fine-tune anymore. You might get title and issue numbers but then run out of space before you can add other qualifiers. 

theres a limit to the length of a search string, but its long, around 200 characters (I didnt count)  so its only a liability when using a very long list of many specific "title plus issue#" listings

[Lightning55]

Flirting with ~200 characters??  I thought we were trying to make this simpler to get the correct results, not harder.

[Aman619]

On 8/1/2022 at 2:26 PM, Lightning55 said:

I don't think you can exclude a specific item, but pretty sure you can exclude a specific seller.  That would get rid of that item, but if they later put one of the same up that you wanted, like at a lower price, that would be excluded before you even saw it.

in advanced search theres a box to add multiple words to exclude. separate each with a comma plus space

[Aman619]

On 8/1/2022 at 4:50 PM, Lightning55 said:

Flirting with ~200 characters??  I thought we were trying to make this simpler to get the correct results, not harder.

based on the search formula presented over the weekend, I built one that was a string of ( "Aquaman 23","Aquaman 23","Aquaman 24")  etc.  that added up to so many characters I could only do 13-16 issues at a time.  longer titles I got fewer issues.

[Lightning55]

On 8/1/2022 at 4:53 PM, Aman619 said:

in advanced search theres a box to add multiple words to exclude. separate each with a comma plus space

Yes, but if he excludes the keywords that are bringing up the wrong item, he also loses the correct items.  By eliminating the seller who has the wrong item, he leaves his keywords intact and gets rid of that guy's annoying non-compliant item.