www.auctionsieve.com

[wickmesh]

Hi Nev,

From today something big has been changed by ebay. It's making AS rather difficult to use.

Across most of my sieves I'm seeing massive search "leakage" - lots of irrelevant (but vaguely related) items appearing. It's as if AS has lost the ability to spot the difference between the actual item results and the "you might be interested in" / "related items" that ebay tags on the bottom.

The searches affected are not consistent - I can run a sieve 3 times and each time I get a different search (or two, or three, or five) within that sieve that "leaks".

For example, I have a music sieve looking for very specific CDs. It normally returns around 50 results from the 31 searches in the sieve. Today I'm seeing 300-800 results from this sieve, depending on which exact search leaks. The leak results can be other CDs from the same artist, CDs with similar names or one of the keywords of a title I'm searching for - or even just a compilation with a track by an artist I'm looking for. But the leak results are still all CDs.

Another example, I have a sieve looking for Land Rover models from a specific manufacturer in a specific scale. I'm seeing leak results from different manufacturers in the same scale, or models not of Land Rovers in the same scale.

Fortunately in some cases I get the error message "There are 474 pages of results. eBay currently don't return more than 200 pages of results. Perhaps you could refine your search criteria. Do you want to continue downloading the first 200 pages?" - to which an NO answer stops the download of any more "leak" results, at least for that search in that sieve.

Kind Regards
Andrew