I have 46 saved searches that use wildcards. Some are simply impossible to re-write without them. For example, I have a search for SMC VV5Q17*. It's very good at matching things like "VV5Q1702UIB970117", "VV5Q17ULB970007", and "VV5Q1702UIB97011", all of which are actual part numbers, from actual items currently listed, returned by this search. There is no possible way to enumerate the part numbers that could be returned by this search - there's tens of thousands of them. I can't eliminate the term, as SMC makes a few thousand similar items that I do not want to find and do not want to wade through.
What kind of drugs are the people at ebay doing to make them think users want fewer features? If someone doesn't find the feature useful, they can simply not use it. How can anyone with a straight face claim they are improving my results by doing this?
Should I just delete my searches and give up? I can not think of any possible way to perform these searches without wildcards. Create a few hundred saved searches each of which is just a copy-paste from a product catalog of (part number 1,part number 2, etc) until reaching the length limit?
It's not just part numbers. For other searches, I use them to find common different spellings or punctuations, none of which ebay's "helpful" use of synonyms could find, and if I enumerate them, I just get a message that my search is too long. Ebay's synonym-matching returns far, far, far more irrelevant results than wildcards ever has. If they want to get rid of things just for the sake of getting rid of things, stop making me need to quote random words in order to make searches return what I wanted!
Is there even someone we can write to about this idiocy? The phone answering people can't do anything, and contact information for anyone else gets fewer and further between every year...
--Randy
