hi, that's quite so, ebay's search as well as alert functions could be improved in many ways. as to search & alert times, in a better world ebay would offer a menu of periods, ranging from some hours to several days--for example in my case i have searches where usually only a few items come in each day, & i'd just as soon get search results every 2 or 3 days rather than every day, if only to reduce the clutter in my box.
one could go further & suggest, for example, they offer the option of EXCLUDING buy-it-now items--with my searches the buy-it-now items tend to be cheap shlock. or the option of excluding whole categories of goods--for example, despite best efforts my search terms for a certain kind of device unfortunately tend to haul in a number of useless auto listings. and also i'd like to search, not just whole words, but simple combinations of letters that may be imbedded in words. and on & on. also another function would be searching for a search term that is near OR NOT near (within some number of words) to another search term--am sure this will have occurred to a lot of people--for example one search term i need is 'pinion' but NOT if it's right near the term 'rack' (bad example--rack doesn't have several meanings so usu. just excluding 'rack' altogether should work--but you get my drift). or the option of excluding sellers offering more than a threshold number of items. or the option of excluding listings of sellers with less than a certain no. of positive FBs or less than a certain rating, like 98. or include only listings containing a minimum byte size jpeg/gif image.... yep, in an better world.....if you're able to set up programs to do these things, i envy you and would be a willing subscriber should you offer it some day while ebay does not
there are some other sites like goofbay that offer what's said to be supplemental searching ability but to date i've found them unsatisfactory