www.auctionsieve.com

hotshoe · AuctionSieve master Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 34

Hi Nev,
I've been happily using Auction Sieve for several years with good results. I have a sieve to search Australian ebay for records. There are about 50 or 60 search item in the sieve, all set to only search in category au306.
I generally search once or twice a week & it might take about 10 minutes to run & returns about 100 to 200 results.

I just ran the search tonight & it took forever, more than one hour. I noticed with one item, that has always been there, the progress report was "searching page 3,000 of 7,500" or something like that. When it finally finished I had 15,000 results. It's too many for me took through however as I look at the early ones they all seem to be buy it now type listings from USA sellers who seem to have thousands of items listed.

I just double checked the categories on ebay Australia & "Music - Records" is still category 306, as I'd thought perhaps a change in category caused the problem. Whatever it is, it seems that sieve is now searching ebay USA & also returning thousands of results that bear no similarity to my search terms, although they are all records.

I'm wondering if anyone else is having similar problems & if there is some explanation for why this has just started to happen. Thanks, Michael.

nev · Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 6:16 am Post subject:

Ok, I'll look into it - there seem to have been a number of changes recently.

Looking at all of them today.

nev · Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 7:14 am Post subject:

Ok, I've had a look and can't replicate it.

Can you send me the details of your sieve?

Easiest thing is to send me your sieve files.
Go to your user folder and then to
Library
Application Support
AuctionSieve

Zip up all the files in there and send them to me.

hotshoe · AuctionSieve master Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 34

Thanks. I zipped & emailed the files to you.

nev · Posted: Mon May 30, 2011 12:50 pm Post subject:

Thanks for sending that through.
That's a mighty big sieve you've got - 225 searches!
Did you edit that by hand?

Just taking one of the searches. You have a search for
w & g
including title and description
in category au306
and have specified "all of these words"

If I go to ebay.com.au and type in that search I get 13,327 results.
Perhaps what you need to have is "exact phrase" (which you've chosen for the majority of your searches).
If I select that, I get 145 results.

Likewise for the second search
5 sunshine
I get 581 results with the option "all of these words" and only 2 results if I choose "exact words, exact order" (that's what they call the option on the advanced ebay search page - I just call it "exact phrase")

Let me know if this solves the problem.

hotshoe · AuctionSieve master Joined: 18 May 2005 Posts: 34

Hi Nev, thanks for your reply. Funnily enough it was the W&G search that I saw taking so long but I wasn't sure if it was the only one. Definitely meant to be exact phrase only; I must have accidentally edited it recently. I didn't know there were 225 searches in that sieve, however I am looking for a lot of 45s. I've been building it up over the years, just adding a few at a time so it wasn't one big effort. Anyway, I'll change those two that you mention. I also altered all the searches to only show records that are located in Australia as that is what I'm interested in and that should help get rid of the USA sellers. Thanks for your assistance & your wonderful app.

nev · Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 1:57 pm Post subject:

Glad to help!