posted on October 20, 2002 08:05:27 AM new
I must have been sleeping!! When did Ebay stop allowing a search under title and description for closed items????
posted on October 20, 2002 12:52:35 PM new
Use the advanced search feature. It has the options you want. The Old search through "completed items" is scheduled to be removed.
posted on October 20, 2002 01:11:10 PM new
Not true, bear 1949. Look carefully when you do a Completed Items search using Advanced Search.
It STILL doesn't search descriptions. As proof, here is the error message I got when I tried to search titles and descriptions in closed auctions using Advanced Search:
"For completed items, eBay can only run a title search but not a title and description search. See the results of your title-only
search below."
paloma91: I have been on eBay since the AuctionWeb days and it has never allowed description search for closed items.
The reason is pretty simple: resources. eBay would have to add some very expensive machinery and support to do this.
Some explanation is in order.
eBay auctions are searchable because they are indexed by the database software. When you search for, say, "Apple Titanium PowerBook" you are not actually looking through every auction; that would take forever. You are searching an index of auctions that is created several times a day.
As we all know (I hope), titles are limited to 45 characters. This is not just eBay being mean. This is trying to impose a reasonable limit to avoid having to buy and support many, many terabytes of disk and more filers in which that disk space resides.
So look at how long most descriptions are. Some, depending on the TOS, are over a thousand characters. So eBay indexes these descriptions for the short term (while the auction is open...10 days max) but drops them once the auction is completed. To keep descriptions around for 90 days would be huge overhead.
posted on October 20, 2002 02:51:15 PM new
No sweat, Bear. I thought the same thing you did until I noticed I wasn't getting results I should have been getting.
posted on October 21, 2002 09:55:49 AM new
The Completed Items search link has been moved from the top of the Search results page to the left hand side of the page under the header Show.
