suggestion for a new feature

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

oh, and i almost forgot... why oh why does not ebay offer the function of doing further searching AMONG initial search results. that would help tremendously. (note for this the google toolbar function of searching a term on a webpage is not good enuf---if i understand it right--as that only moves you from one instance of one or a few terms to another.) surely ebay must soon offer the function of doing a sub-search within initial search results. if you know of a way, i will be indebted if you can point it out--is there another site that can supplement ebay functions in this regard?.....

I think these are all good suggestions, especially searching among search results. I'd like to add another suggestion to the list: The query URL created by eBay Search is not as long as it could be, and AS Search has the same problem. Using the eBay query URL as a starting point, I've created a much longer search query and put it on my Bookmark Toolbar. It works great - I can click on it from anywhere to get my search results - but it's a nuisance to modify it (I use Notebook). I'm not a programmmer, but this is a simple idea. Seems like AS could easily do something similar that would allow full-length search queries.

Tom

quote:

I'm not a programmmer,

Or a spelller either, it would seeem. Tom