eBay shoppers are complaining that the "favorite searches" feature is broken. On the eBay discussion forum devoted to search issues, a buyer posted, "I have a list of Favorite Searches stored on My eBay. I use them once a week to check for stuff. I always get many hundreds of results. Today they all give me 0 results. Did eBay change something? Or, is something broken?"

eBay allows users to save up to 100 of their Favorite Searches, and users can choose to have new results sent to them by email (http://pages.ebay.com/help/find/search_favorites.html). Sellers are particularly sensitive to glitches this time of year as the holiday shopping season is gearing up, especially when they think buyers are thwarted in finding relevant items for which they are looking.

Another longtime eBay user who has hundreds of saved Favorite Searches that he has been running for years said some of them are no longer working. In a discussion board post, he explained how one of his saved searches filters out certain words to make the results more relevant. However, rather than filtering out the words, eBay Favorite Searches now adds those words to the search.

"Here is an example of one of my keyword searches: "davison +chile -(geographic, Motorcycle, dvd, video, videos)." When I do this search eBay changes the search to: "davison chile geographic Motorcycle dvd video videos" for ALL OF THESE WORDS,...""

He also pointed out that the search is set up to search Title & Description, but said now it is searching the Title only.

AuctionBytes learned of the complaints on Sunday evening and was unable to contact eBay before press time.

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=1000370149

http://forums.ebay.com/db1/thread.jspa?threadID=2000240616