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wickmesh
AuctionSieve yoda


Joined: 04 Jun 2008
Posts: 264
Location: Burton on Trent, England

PostPosted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:17 pm    Post subject: Ebay change - AS missing "More items like these" o Reply with quote

Hi Nev,

Ebay have changed something and every so often AS is missing that the search has returned zero results - and picking up the "other suggestions" (or whatever it is that ebay has made or done).

I'd love to give you an example - but guess what, it's not consistent and I'm struggling to find one!

I noticed it first in a fairly simple sieve looking for a particular band's fan club magazine. It's rare and hard to find - in fact I've never found one - so there are quite a few zero-results searches in my sieve. Ebay "decided" to present AS with results of fan club magazines from pretty much any random band - and then (upon redoing the sieve to see which search had the issue) the random band results are gone again...

I'll keep my eye open and see if I can give an example that is consistent!

Kind Regards
Andrew
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wickmesh
AuctionSieve yoda


Joined: 04 Jun 2008
Posts: 264
Location: Burton on Trent, England

PostPosted: Thu Feb 01, 2018 6:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, it's doing it to many of my sieves. It's a pain in the backside.... BUT it means I can give an example!

Searching: ebay.co.uk
Search term: boothby graffoe -wot -italian
All of these words
Include Store Items
Only search in category: uk176984
Max price: 12

Ebay in this example has decided to ignore the category and show me items from across the site - so I'm not just searching for CDs but finding DVDs and postcards from the village of the same name.

When I plug the search above into ebay.co.uk I get the message "0 results found in the CDs category, so we searched in all categories" - and it's this change that AS is [sometimes] failing to pick up.

It looks like it's a zero-results-in-a-category thing - as the band fan club mag sieve also uses category restricted searches...
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wickmesh
AuctionSieve yoda


Joined: 04 Jun 2008
Posts: 264
Location: Burton on Trent, England

PostPosted: Mon Feb 05, 2018 11:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

This issue is still happening today (with version 3.0.0)...
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wickmesh
AuctionSieve yoda


Joined: 04 Jun 2008
Posts: 264
Location: Burton on Trent, England

PostPosted: Thu Mar 08, 2018 8:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Frankly this one is becoming a real pain in the backside, as it's not just category searches now. Below is an example, it's affecting loads of searches where there are zero results - and AS is failing to catch that ebay has returned zero results, and "helpfully" changed the search.

Use ebay.co.uk
Search term "artapo" all of these words
Search Title & Description
Include Store Items
Show Items from Preferred Locations Worldwide

Today ebay decided that "Artapo" would be replaced with "Artago" - so AS downloads the first 50 "Artago" results, then looks for the second 50 of "Artapo" that don't exist, so I get the "ebay is returning error pages or pages I can't interpret, for..." message.

It's having two effects - I'm now seeing the above message frequently - and I'm getting multiple lots of 50 junk results turning up in lots of my sieves now, making it harder to find the things I'm looking for.

It's been over a month since I first reported this... Sad
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nev
Site Admin


Joined: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 1144
Location: Sydney, Australia

PostPosted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 4:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My apologies for lack of response.
Should get to it this weekend.
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nev
Site Admin


Joined: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 1144
Location: Sydney, Australia

PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 10:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, that artapo one is nasty.
There's nothing at all on the page to indicate they've swapped your search term - so rude!

But there's a workaround - put it in quotes.
So make your search term "artapo" instead of just artapo.

Comparison

artapo
https://www.ebay.co.uk/dsc/i.html?_sop=1&_fosrp=1&_dmd=1&_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=1&_nkw=artapo&LH_PrefLoc=2&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xartapo.TRS0&_osacat=0&_odkw=%22artapo%22

"artapo"
https://www.ebay.co.uk/dsc/i.html?_fosrp=1&_sop=1&_dmd=1&_from=R40&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=1&_nkw=%22artapo%22&LH_PrefLoc=2&_trksid=p2045573.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.X%22artapo%22.TRS0&_odkw=artapo&_osacat=0

If that's not sufficient, there *may* be a way for me to check that the page returned results for the term you wanted instead of replacing it. But it could be tricky and I'm not sure it would be safe - ie in some cases may erroneously think the terms don't match when they actually do. In which case you'd get no results when they're actually relevant.

Let me know what you think.
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nev
Site Admin


Joined: 15 Sep 2004
Posts: 1144
Location: Sydney, Australia

PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 11:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, I sat refreshing and eventually got the first problem to happen with the boothby search.

New beta is out with a fix.
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wickmesh
AuctionSieve yoda


Joined: 04 Jun 2008
Posts: 264
Location: Burton on Trent, England

PostPosted: Mon Mar 12, 2018 7:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hi Nev,

Thanks for looking at this - unfortunately I don't think it's fixed, sorry.

As you say the Artapo one is nasty - and yes your workaround works - but there's an obvious thing on the pages (your two links) to compare. Ebay returns the responses " 299 results for artago" and "0 results for "artapo" "... Maybe add a tickbox to each each search in the sieve so a comparison (to check what ebay actually returns vs the requested term) is optional, if it could be dangerous?

So more examples... Take the fan club magazine sieve mentioned in the first post. First try this afternoon, it gets two results (which I've already seen so they are hidden). Try it again - and I get 45 results, of which 19 are hidden (as I've seen them before - no trash words). The problem is that this sieve contains 5 searches - and it's hard to work out which one has generated the rubbish result, as they're all very similar. OK, I can sit and watch it and monitor the results that come in - but that's a pain. But it's damn near impossible to work out which search is causing the problem on my much larger sieves (e.g. the one that contains 149 searches). This feature request (T2i: here and here and here and here) would aid in diagnosing these problems... (in fact I'd expand it now and ask for the sieve number to appear in the "pages I can't interpret" error message box also) but I digress.

Search ebay.co.uk
"wet wet wet fan club" All of these words
Search category 267

Search ebay.co.uk
""wet wet wet" splash" All of these words

Search ebay.co.uk
"wet wet wet splash 11" All of these words
Search category 2328

Search ebay.co.uk
"wet wet wet splash 11" All of these words
Search category 267

Search ebay.co.uk
"wet wet wet fan club" All of these words
Search category 2328


Another example. I'm not sure what's going wrong with it, but one of these searches (again, I cannot be sure which!) is giving the "pages I can't interpret" error tonight on the 3rd page of results (150 of 4850). (One of these searches has been doing something similar for a while, but not always on the same page of results - sometimes 100, sometimes 150, sometimes many different pages and it will work OK if repeatedly retried, sometimes gives up in the 2000s.)

Search (1) ebay.com (2) ebay.nl (3) ebay.fr (4) ebay.de (5) ebay.com.sg (6) ebay.es (7) ebay.ch
"(1/20, 1/21, 1/22, 1/23, 1/24, 1/25, 1/26, 1/28, 1/72, 1/76, 1/87, 1/92, 1/148) ("land rover*", landrove*, "range rover*", rangerover*, freelander*, LR2, LR3, LR4, evoque) -spline -halfsh* -drivesh* -ford -dale -"spark plu*" -bolts -avarus -transfer -magazi* -wiper*"
Include store items
Show items from Preferred Locations Worldwide

(Yes I know there's a bucket load of out-of-date wildcards in there; I'm trying to update and refine my sieves to get rid of these, but without T2i that takes time! With this current error/issue it's also rather hard to decide if the new searches are doing the job, too...)


Another example. Again, not sure which search is the issue.

Search ebay.co.uk
"fine british engineering sticker" All of these words
Include store items
Max price 6

Search ebay.co.uk
"fine british engineering sticker -kaiser -army -orbiter" All of these words
Search title and description
Include store items
Max price 6

This item is given as a result - the word "sticker" is nowhere to be seen, has it been turned to "stamps" by ebay?
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/323131860666
(It looks like I'm also getting "no dogs with fine", "british airways engineering" and "british rail engineering" stickers from these searches, the "no dogs" ones I've trash-worded out of my results - but no sign of the amusing Land Rover sticker I was looking for.)


I hope these further examples help... I noticed recently that I joined this forum in June 2008, so I've been using AS for nearly 10 years now. Wow! It also means I'm at least 10 years older than my profile picture Laughing

Kind Regards
Andrew
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