www.auctionsieve.com

[tatami]

I collect fashion photos and would like to set up a sieve to search in various photography categories for the keyword fashion. Trouble is that eBay pages have the word fashion as one of the tabs at the top of the page so AuctionSieve returns thousands and thousands of items. Is there some way around this? I'd really appreciate any hints and tips.

Thanks

P

[wickmesh]

It should be possible to do this quite easily, I search particular categories on ebay for particular keywords. Ebay does throw a wobbly and remove the category if it finds no results (I was having hassle with "Fat Boys" in Toys and Games uk220 a while back) but Auctionsieve now catches when ebay does this.

Finding the category number is a pain, you have to browse to it from the Categories link and extract the number from the URL. Alternatively Turbo Lister lets you browse the categories when you write listings for things and will give you the number.

...However I think ebay have changed something again because it's broken! Searches that should be confined to one category are spilling over again, particularly ones in the uk307 category CDs. Trying to fix this myself, browsing to the category suggests ebay might be changing the category numbers, what was uk307 now comes up as uk176984?

So checking Turbo Lister - confused now as still says uk307 - actually just run the auto update in Turbo Lister and yes the CDs category is now uk176984!

So to test, I have just changed the category number in my sieve from uk307 to uk176984 - and normal service is resumed! So that's what ebay have changed - will have to watch out for this...

[tatami]

Thanks for your reply and I've managed to find the various category codes. The trouble is that even searching in specific categories is unmanageable because there's a tab containing the word 'fashion' at the top of every single auction. That means my search picks up all the items in each category, not just those whose description contains the word 'fashion'. I've tried using the search term 'fashion photograph' (all words rather than exact phrase and search in title and description) but this again yields an unmanageable list of items

[wickmesh]

Are you sure it's picking out that tab?

If I search for "fashion" in category 625 (Cameras and Photography) on ebay.co.uk I get 7,834 results. If I search for "electronics" (which is the previous tab) I get 95,549 results! The category contains 694,858 items - surely if ebay was including those search tabs, then I'd get the same number (694,858) if I search for "fashion" or "electronics"?

It might be different on regional sites though - which site do you use tatami?