www.auctionsieve.com

[archaea]

Hi Nev and everybody. I've joined the forum because there is a search pattern that I like to do every now and then that I can't get Auction Sieve to do correctly for me. eBay will do it fine, but the string that works in eBay doesn't work in Auction Sieve, and I can't find an alternative string syntax that will get Auction Sieve to produce the desired results either.
Rather than provide the specific strings that I wish to use that I can't get Auction Sieve to handle correctly for me, I'll provide a much shorter, simpler test string which has all the essential ingredients of the search string I would like to be able to use, but not the cumbersome length of the strings that I want to use.
If one wishes to search eBay (Australia) for all items containing either CAT or DOG COLLAR, one can do it with the search string (cat, "dog collar"). eBay returns everything that contains either the word CAT or the adjacent words DOG COLLAR, but does NOT return anything that contains only the word COLLAR unless the word DOG is immediately in front of it.
Auction Sieve, on the other hand, when fed the same search string, has problems.
If I choose the "any of these words" option with the search string (cat, "dog collar"), which is what I would expect to be the correct choice, then Auction Sieve returns everything with any one or more of the words CAT, DOG, or COLLAR.
If I choose the "exact phrase" option with the search string (cat, "dog collar"), Auction Sieve produces everything that contains all three words, in any order, in any position in the item title. If there are items there that include "DOG COLLAR", it is coincidence, because there are also items there containing "COLLAR DOG", and items with the two words not adjacent at all.
If I choose the "all of these words" option, then Auction Sieve finds everything containing any one or more of CAT, DOG, or COLLAR, anywhere in the title, but also returns countless other items which don't contain any of the words CAT, DOG, or COLLAR and which are quite irrelevant to the search.
I've tried every other syntax for the search string that I can think of, without ever succeeding in getting only the items that I am searching for. In the end I concluded that the correct syntax was that which is valid in eBay, and (cat, "dog collar") is valid in eBay and produces the expected result in eBay.
Ok, it's hard to imagine why one would ever want to find everything containing either the word CAT, or everything containing the two adjacent words DOG COLLAR. The reason I chose (cat, "dog collar") to use for my example here is because that search string is a nice, short, simple search string which adequately demonstrates the problem in Auction Sieve that I have repeatedly encountered when attempting to use much longer and much more complicated search strings.
I might sound like I'm whinging here. For that I apologise. I don't mean to. I love Auction Sieve and I use it all the time, but I do wish it could handle a search for CAT or DOG COLLAR correctly.
Am I doing something wrong here, or does Auction Sieve really have a problem here? Is there a way to make Auction Sieve do this (CAT, "DOG COLLAR") search correctly that I haven't found yet?
Archaea

[wickmesh]

This used to work perfectly - simply using the string (cat, "dog collar") and "All of these words" would have the desired effect. I also added "Restricted to £1" to keep the number of results sensible.

I've just tested this morning - AS gives a spot on (and highly suspicious) 50 results, while ebay.co.uk gives 32,656! Of which some AS results clearly do not contain "dog collar" e.g. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/171668863342.

I have A LOT of search terms that use this kind of syntax, hence my interest. So let's look at a real search I use:
("8v-28v","6v-34v") -pajero -shogun
Restricted to £35, search Worldwide
AS and ebay.co.uk both give the same 4 results...

So it seems it works for some search terms but not for others??? And my sieves are not full of the sort of junk that would suggest this functionality is broken - yet I get the same result as archaea?

I have however noticed this morning a significant drop in the number of results - sieves that previously returned 3000 results today returning only 200. Could be just a temporary ebay glitch... could be more. I will search again later today and see.

[nev]

I'll look into it
https://trello.com/b/cg7YsK0X/auctionsieve

[wickmesh]

New Beta (2.7.1.1) improves things - but I'm afraid this is not fixed. For the (cat, "dog collar") search, 1093 results in AS, still 32,002 on ebay.co.uk...

[nev]

I've just done the search on ebay.com.au with max price of $1 and the results are exactly the same as AuctionSieve - about 4600 results.

Also just tried it for uk and it gives the same results in both - about 27000 results.

Are you guys still seeing this? Perhaps another example?

[wickmesh]

I think the new beta (2.7.1.1) has fixed this after all (both the quantity and syntax issues), as best I can see. I'd left "Exact Phrase" selected rather than "All Of These Words" in my test sieve, which is why before it didn't seem to be fixed before - my error, sorry.

All the results with just the word 'dog' on its own in them seem to have 'cat' as well; all the results with 'collar' say 'dog' before or have 'cat' in them...

However it's worth noting (while looking for a suitable example search term with less results) I'm wondering if ebay have changed things, trying to be "helpful". Searching for the word 'jackall' brings up results with 'jackal' in them. Searching for 'rooftent' brings up results with 'roof tent', to get just 'rooftent' I need to search for '"rooftent"'...

As an example, the search term (rooftent, "ip20 led") [searched worldwide] works exactly as expected; I get the same number of results on ebay.co.uk (75 reported as 212 by ebay due to variation listings) as in AS.