Active Listings Search Issue - Search matches full words only

[wellingnorth]

On the Manage Active Listings page in My Ebay if I search by for example 'title' and choose 'contains' from the drop down it seems to match only whole words rather than partial strings of text. 

So for example if I put 'thread' it finds one listing with 'thread' in the title, but if i try again and search for 'thre' it doesn't find any, whereas surely it should find the one with 'thread'

The same thing happens searching for 'custom label' +  'contains' - it only matches full words whereas you would think this might often contain a mixed string of text rather than full words separated by spaces.

[ccla3379]

I think the default searching is using words as tokens but try placing your word fragment inside double-quotes ("thre") I seem to remember using this method previously although it was a long while back.

Alternatively, where the number of listed items isn't huge, then increasing the number shown on the page and using browser-searching may be quicker.

I did a quick hunt for help pages on searching within the Seller side of eBay but couldn't spot any - I'll suggest it if the opportunity arises.

[wellingnorth]

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@ccla3379 wrote:

I think the default searching is using words as tokens but try placing your word fragment inside double-quotes ("thre") I seem to remember using this method previously although it was a long while back.

Alternatively, where the number of listed items isn't huge, then increasing the number shown on the page and using browser-searching may be quicker.

I did a quick hunt for help pages on searching within the Seller side of eBay but couldn't spot any - I'll suggest it if the opportunity arises.

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Thanks for the reply and for now I've been using browser search as you suggest which is basically fine.

Your suggestion about double quotes is interesting and does seem to work somewhat, but with limits - for example, searching for 'mismatched', if I put "mismatch" in quotes it finds it, "mism" in quotes also works, but I get no results for "match" nor "mis" in quotes. So as far I can see whatever is in quotes needs to be 4 characters minimum and search only finds it if they are at the start of a word.

[ccla3379 · Accepted solution]

Ah, that is interesting behaviour - I don't know but it is possible the quotes are forcing the search to go through the text chunk index and it is not uncommon for there to be a lower limit on the chunk size to keep the speed to be acceptable when run of very large datasets, and an index would probably only get used when text begins with the text provided.   This strays into the area of system tuning which becomes a trade-off when you have a billion users hitting it thousands of times a day.

One other method I forgot to mention, was to extract a report of your listed items (Reports -> Downloads), pop it into a spreadsheet and filter away 🙂

[wellingnorth]

Thanks for this, that's interesting that there may be a designed in reason for the behaviour - I hadn't really considered how a search like this might be a trade off between perfect results and server load.