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Metasearch tool with boolean ops & reproducable results

 
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The_Fool
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 25, 2023 10:39 am    Post subject: Metasearch tool with boolean ops & reproducable results Reply with quote

Hello everyone,

this is probably the wrong forum to post this. However, since I couldn't find a related tool or other community online and I'm so happy with the simplicity and straightforwardness of gixen and its website, I thought about posting it here, with the hope that gixen developer or others can shed some light in it and offer their thoughts.

I'm one of those ebay users that's very disappointed with ebay's search engine and I wish it would go back to the old days (pre-2010).

Search results are heavily manipulated, they no longer produce repeatable results lists, only basic boolean operators work and even these not always, etc. There's no point in complaining to ebay about it, none at all.
Let's say for example, that I want to search for a lenovo thinkpad x13 laptop only on the german ebay.de website and I'd also like to know what price past auctions have reached, so that I will know what to expect. Every time I change one parameter, e.g. show only completed auctions, other options like the show worldwide results will be automatically activated, messing up my results, adding stuff to them I don't even care about (e.g. ideapad laptops, p1 laptops, whatever) and pissing me off.
I know why ebay is doing this and I really don't care about their sales. In the end, no person in their right mind would want to scroll through 13,000 mostly unrelated results, just because ebay search is sales optimized.

So I was wondering how difficult it would be, to develop some sort of metasearch software that would filter and offer reproducable search results every time, by offering most, if not all of ebay's filtering options and advanced boolean search operators (XOR, XAND, etc).

I'm not a software developer nor a lawyer, just a simple (power?) user. I'd like to spark a discussion about it, in the hopes that I would find some answers to my question: since ebay has almost a monopoly on online auctions and sales of used products and there are many people disappointed with its search engine as it is, why has there been no efforts to fix this through thirt party apps?

For those of you using internet services for more that 20 years, back in the day when google wasn't the de facto search engine, there were metasearch software like Copernic agent, that would do something similar with search results from multiple internet search engines. I think such a tool would be very useful in the case of ebay.

What do people think? Does anyone have (programming or legal) experience with these things and if so, what are the obstacles that prevent people from developing a third party service like that.

I cannot be the only one that thinks ebay search results are just messed up. A simple search about "ebay search results problems" can prove me right.
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