ebay Hates Money: Wildcard (*) Searching Removed

[Friendly]

Yet another ebay-disimprovement:

"Search using the wildcard symbol (*) is no longer supported."

[cools]

I've never used a wildcard on eBay and my account's been used since 1999. What did it do?

[undamned]

I've never used a wildcard on eBay and my account's been used since 1999. What did it do?

+1
-ud

[shmuppyLove]

Me neither, and I used to have some fairly advanced searches saved (NOTs, ORs, etc)

It shouldn't be necessary, I think it will automatically match on substrings.

e.g. if you search for "play" you'll get results for "play", "player", "playstation", etc.

[Ed Oscuro]

I often go shopping on eBay for logical operatives

Shmuppy is right, partial matches have worked for a long time.

I will say this - I was just there looking at my eBay messages inbox and I realized that they don't have an outbox / sent messages view in the place where you'd normally expect it. Boo. I think eBay must be an engineering nightmare right now, with all the old pages, old bits of whatever, and the formulas to keep, all while pushing out insane amounts of data.

[Friendly]

Shmuppy is right, partial matches have worked for a long time.

Nope.

For instance:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=oretachi+akumajo
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=oretachi+akumajou

[Ed Oscuro]

Hmm, nevermind. Actually, that's right. I remember now that it pisses me off to have to put in all kinds of slight variations on a Japanese phrase (or even an English word, to account for people's misspellings) and then just get irrelevant stuff anyway.

edit - lol, there is a big link to the SENT folder in the messages view.

Anyway, MAME that game lol

[Koa Zo]

I used wildcard searches all the time.
And just discovered this retarded change the other night.

I searched Mizubaku* because sometimes people list it as Mizubaku's
It said no results were found :/

ebay also removed the category selection from the search bar after you make an initial search.
Dumbing it down for the lowest common denominator.

I cant understand why they would disable wildcard searching. It's not lot it taxes their resources.
It literally led to many more purchases on my part. I would often find items I would never have seen otherwise.

[cools]

Well, I never knew it didn't substring search properly. Shame it's gone, I'd have found it useful on occasion.

[Friendly]

http://community.ebay.co.uk/topic/Searc ... 21?start=0
and here
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/topic/Search ... ?start=168


A huge number of people are complainging about it because the change makes using ebay much worse, actually leading to less business (=smaller turnover). It really makes no sense, no matter from which perspective you look at it.
As usual, ebay doesn't react at all.

This is probably the worst change since ebay removed the ability to message other bidders (making it impossible to issue warnings, leading to more people getting scammed but more money for ebay).

[BIL]

Fucking thing sucks.

edit:

[Friendly]

+1
-ud

+1-ud=?

[Friendly]

By the way, on ebay.fr and ebay.de it still works. For now.

Same search example as above:
http://www.ebay.de/sch/i.html?_nkw=oret ... _PrefLoc=2

I read a complaint by someone buying old books from the 1800s on ebay; they now have to seach for "book + (1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899)" instead of "book + 18*"

EDIT: They actually have to do it in several steps because there is also a 100 character limit in place.

If you are looking for items with a product number within a certain range you are totally screwed as well.

It's quite hilarious how inept the person(s) who implemented this are. They really should be unemployed instead of being allowed anywhere near the search engine of ebay (=its bread and butter).

[Fudoh]

I'm so with you on this.

I got an email from eBay.com about 2 weeks saying that the wildcard search will be canceled. And that's (probably) only because I had several searched saves which used an asterisk. I still have about a hundred automatic searches saved on ebay.de - nearly all of them using wildcards. But I already fear for the worst...

Another really idiotic decision (also not too long ago) was to hide search results not available to your country. This is so ridiculous, since I will just use a proxy, if an american seller won't ship overseas. Now I don't even get the results listed (on ebay.com) unless I log in with an american account.

[Friendly]

Another really idiotic decision (also not too long ago) was to hide search results not available to your country. This is so ridiculous, since I will just use a proxy, if an american seller won't ship overseas. Now I don't even get the results listed (on ebay.com) unless I log in with an american account.

Just terrible.

The "best results" thing is total nonsense, too - it means you have to do an additional mouse-click after each search to sort the resuls by price or end-date.
Which brings me to the next idiotic change: Ebay no longer shows you the end date of an auction in the list of items on your "My ebay" page. Who cares if an auction ends in 8 days, 3 hours and 37 minutes, for crying out loud? If there is an important auction, I use the electronic calender of my cell-phone to remind me. What good is it to only show the remaining time? Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea?

One idiotic change after the other.

I wonder if there is a good external tool you could use to search all of ebay and manage your auctions so you don't have to deal with all this bullshit?

[RGC]

So, what's their motivation for this? I'm assuming there must be a genuine reason, since it's taken effort to implement the change. Were there bugs associated with wildcard searches or something?

[Friendly]

So, what's their motivation for this? I'm assuming there must be a genuine reason, since it's taken effort to implement the change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTUl9A3dN70

[trap15]

So, what's their motivation for this? I'm assuming there must be a genuine reason, since it's taken effort to implement the change. Were there bugs associated with wildcard searches or something?

The developers have to do something

[Ed Oscuro]

Perhaps I have missed it, but would somebody be kind and link us to a relevant thread on eBay? I'm sure that even calling wouldn't make much difference but damned if I won't try.

Killing product searches is terrible. Having that string of numbers for books is - then again, fuck dealers and hoarders, right?

So, what's their motivation for this? I'm assuming there must be a genuine reason, since it's taken effort to implement the change. Were there bugs associated with wildcard searches or something?

The developers have to do something

This explains everything...the pyramids, Nostradamus and Moby Dick, the weather balloons, even Windows 8!

[Friendly]

Perhaps I have missed it, but would somebody be kind and link us to a relevant thread on eBay?

Look a few posts above: http://shmups.system11.org/viewtopic.ph ... 72#p851472

There are several threads with people complaining. After a while the well-paid ebay customer service interns stopped trying to give advice and explain this, because frankly, there is no explanation.

[Friendly]

So, this is now a world wide thing; you can no longer use * searches anywhere.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

I remember noticing a while ago that search engines in general seemed to stop doing this. Are wildcard searches really that much more server-intensive than a standard search even with how powerful hardware is nowadays that they want to remove them?

Or is it possible that whatever powers eBay's searches is third-party software that's fairly commonly installed in other search engines or whatnot?

[shmuppyLove]

Related but not related

Just recently sold something on eBay and got payment through PayPal.

There's now a 21-day hold on any payments from eBay????

Won't be selling on eBay again anytime soon.

[rancor]

I just sold something last night, and payment was available immediately.. ?

If you don't get paid for 21 days, I wouldn't ship for 22 days at least.

[Skykid]

Related but not related

Just recently sold something on eBay and got payment through PayPal.

There's now a 21-day hold on any payments from eBay????

Won't be selling on eBay again anytime soon.

I would be very surprised if that was a new policy. In some cases the payee's bank a/c isn't verified or Paypal consider it suspicious for some reason and place a hold. It could also be an echeque.

Of course held payments are done in the name of security, but Paypal generally does it on purpose at random so they can use the funds to gain millions of dollars in interest, all the while under the pretense that they're not a bank (so aren't subject to bank tax rates.)

[shmuppyLove]

Shrugs, I guess maybe because I haven't sold anything in a while.

https://www.paypal.com/ca/webapps/mpp/s ... learn-more

Sounds like if I print the shipping label through PayPal they'll release it faster, so I guess that's the way to go now.

[system11]

They have recently introduced this - it's based on various factors unfortunately. Even if you have a long term account with no disputes, Paypal can consider an immediate attempt to transfer the funds to your bank suspicious. Getting sick of it now. It's in there interest to make all of this as difficult as possible because they don't defend chargebacks, and putting barriers up on received money means they'll more often have funds to claw back.