Ebay's Newest Change Is The Worst One Yet.

This one truly boggles the mind. And unlike most previous ebay changes I've railed against, this one is primarily buyer-hostile (also ultimately seller-hostile as sales will be reduced).

ebay is removing the ability to do wildcard searches (the asterisk * function).

They have already removed it from completed auction searches in most categories and will be removing it from searches of live listings within the next few weeks.

References to the wildcard have also been removed from ebay's advanced search documentation.

I depend on using the wildcard to be able to drill down to specific listings, find misspellings, or to find "sleepers" that have been mis-listed.

This makes no sense.

When does it take effect? I just tried it and it worked fine.

As I said, in the next few weeks. Try doing a wildcard search on completed listings.

THAT SUCKS! Sorry for yelling, but.....

I did and it worked.

What is a wildcard search ?

Pardon my ignorance, but what is a wildcard search please? Not heard of this one, and now apparently it's too late.

I just read some of the posts on ebay's "Search" group discussion. Buyers and sellers alike are pretty upset to say the least. I'm not surprised at ebay anymore given their long history of not paying attention to the old saying, "if it's not broken, don't fix it".

Weird... It looks like in this interim period some are working and some are not.

Try the following:

reven*
illeg*
186*

None of those work on completed listings any more. They're saved searches of mine that I used daily.

Doesn't make sense. I would think that ebay would want their buyers to be able to look at as many listings as possible. I mean they do make money when someone buys something. If I miss some listings because I don't see them, then those are items I won't be able to buy...right?

Why would they want to hurt their own profits?

FWIW, I search categories as well as have a pretty complex wildcard search.

The question is, why the hell would they do that

The first two didn't work in completed U.S listings but rev* and ill* did, as did 186*.

All three still function in the active listings section.

there is a website that has a similar feature...at least, as of 2007
when I last it. Maybe ebay plans to acquire them and capitalize
on us........again. like turbo lister etc...outside developed programs that
they can sell...TYPOBuddy might be the name......for ebay and craigslist.
now...if you could put ebay and quickbooks together somehow....you could be the next Bill Gates...maybe

Not working here. They are returning results, but ONLY results that have "rev" only, or "ill" only. In other words, rev* is not returning "revenue", ill* is not returning "illegal" and 186" returns Scott #186, but NOT the years 1862-1869, which is the purpose of the wildcard.

I haven't a clue what you are all going on about.
As my simple question seemed to have been overlooked, time to move on to another thread.
Enjoy the wildcard searches....or not, as the case may be.



Londonbus1

Okay. To steal a quote from guykickinit -- THAT SUCKS!




Michael, a wildcard search allows you to enter several letters and then a special character like * or % and the search engine will find all words that begin with the characters that you entered.