eBay search character limit

A while back, eBay changed their search function to limit a search to 100 characters. Because of this, we had to change TypoJoe’s search engine to break down the misspelled keyword list generated into searches that are 100 characters or less.

If you have a long keyword or a keyword phrase, it will take a lot of separate searches to complete the misspellings generated for just one misspellings search.

We have not applied for a higher call limit (at least not at the time of this writing) through eBay, so we have a set number of eBay calls we can use per day. So, we limit the number of hundred character searches per spelling search.

So, for keyword phrases, you may want to try them separately. If your keyword phrase was “Oriental Antique”, you can try a search with a both keywords included, but also try each of them separately, just in case your search got cut off before all of the misspellings generated were searched for (When more than one key word is searched for, misspellings are generated for one word while keeping the correct spelling for the other word in the same search, and once the first word is done, the second word then has its misspellings generated while keeping the first word spelled correctly. Obviously, this adds many characters to the total search).

We are working on a couple other things at the moment, but hope to look into applying for a higher call limit in the very near future. By the time you read this, we may already have applied and received a higher limit, and this may no longer be an issue (searching keyword phrases only one word at a time).

Something else when you’re searching using a keyword phrase rather than just one keyword – don’t bother adding small common words like “the”, “and”, etc. for example, if you’re searching for The Chronicles of Narnia (hopefully I spelled that right), don’t include “the” and “of”, just search for “Chronicles Narnia”. misspellings of those small common words aren’t going to help in a misspelling search, and probably bring back a lot of results that don’t have much of a chance of being useful to you.

We’d like to get some more feedback from you, our user, as to what sort of features you would like to see in the future here on TypoJoe, so if you have any ideas, use the contact page and let us know.

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