Vivisimo has created a new way to find eBay items by organizing eBay search results into categories. Searchers can also sort search results by price, time, or number of bids. While in Beta, the tool will find a maximum of 500 eBay items, but will be expanded when launched.

Let's say you are searching for vintage typewriter, and you use the Vivisimo eBay tool at http://www.vivisimo.com/ebay. Vivisimo brings back results in the same order that eBay brings them back. But on the left side of the search results page, you see folders with types of vintage typewriters. When I did my search, the folders that appeared included: "Tin, Ribbon"; "Royal"; "Keys"; "Corona, Smith"; "Remington"; "Toy"; "Underwood"; and "Charm, Silver." Next to each folder name it indicates the number of listings.

You can click on the Remington folder and find just those eBay listings that contain the word "Remington" in the title. (In Vivisimo's Advanced Search, you can check the Title and Description option to expand the results.) Vivisimo folders are created on the fly, and there are no pre-determined categories or folder names.

For popular items, it's unlikely searchers will scroll through hundreds of pages of search results when they do a search on eBay. By organizing the results into categories, Vivisimo can help searchers narrow down the results and help them find what they are looking for. You can also sort by price, time and bids (see the tabs above the folder names). Most useful is the "Bids" tab.

If you are looking for vintage typewriters that have gotten a lot of bids try the following: (As a buyer, you may feel there is a reason for the item's popularity; as a seller, you might want to examine those auctions to see what makes them stand out to help you design your own auctions.)

Click on the "Bids" tab, and the folders on the left become categories consisting of ranges of bids. In the case of the vintage typewriter search, the folders are "1 bid"; "2 bids"; "3 bids"; "4 bids"; "6 bids"; "7 bids"; "10 or more Bids"; and "Other Bids." In my search, there were two auctions with 10 or more bids. However, they were both auctions for just the keys, sans typewriter. I clicked on the "7 bids" folder and came up with two auctions for typewriters.

What would be even more useful is if I could search by number of bids in a particular folder rather than across all results brought back by "vintage typewriter."

When you do an eBay search using the Vivisimo tool, the results that are brought back are organized by items ending first. If you look to the right above the list of items, you'll see you can click on "newly listed"; "lowest priced"; and "highest priced." If you click on these options, Vivisimo will re-run the search on eBay, bringing back new results.

Saman Haqqui, Vivisimo's Director of Marketing, said the company created the tool as a demonstration of its clustering technology, the same reason it created the search engine on its home page at www.vivisimo.com. Vivisimo believes there is opportunity for both tools to stand on their own and are exploring revenue models. In the case of the eBay tool, they are considering the affiliate revenue model. They have no plans to charge for searching.

Vivisimo currently uses the individual (non-commercial) API from eBay and plans to sign on with a commercial license when ready to launch its full version. Unfortunately the Vivisimo tool does not have an option for searching completed auctions. eBay restricted access to completed auction data in December when it began marketing its data content license program http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y203/m12/abu0109/s02.

What do you think? Is this a valuable tool? How could it be made better? Post your thoughts in the AuctionBytes forum.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=8512