eBay Changing their search function?

[Mark Goo]

Something's different. If you search for "lava lamp" in all catagories, items come up that do not even have lava or lamp in their titles. Does anyone know what is going on? I looks like eBay is returning search results if the terms are in the description too.

MG

[Brian]

that is possible, i noticed that I got some shirts in my search results. It does seem like they are changing things again. Now I got to be more specific when searching.

[Mark Goo]

Albuquerque is good. I'm starting to get to that point where I just want to see spring come around the corner.

If ebay changes the way their search works, everyone will be pissed. They've always had the best system in my book. The mall auctions are the ones that have to spread the results becuase the inventory is small.
MG

[Novemberchild]

Just a FYI, sellers may also use "invisible" text (e.g.white on white, you'd only see it if you mark the whole text) to boost their auction, which I guess is an illegal action that can and should be reported to ebay.

[LavaMeister]

Here's a search string for eBay I worked out today that yields very impressive results. It weeds out a bunch of useless items. Just copy and paste it to the eBay search box.

"lava lamp" -Orbitz -glitter -university -usb -dvd -nightlight -night -nightlights -cd -rug -print -charm -Zippo -rubber -purse -speakers -video -battery -ornament -aquarium -shirt -plasma -lucite -ring -shot -pens

You can also substitute the word lite, lites or lamps for the word lamp in the search string to get different results. I got back an extremely short list compared to the original search string.


That will pretty much hit all the good stuff.

To learn more about how to use boolean operators in eBay go to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/search/search-commands.html