Drinkable Chicken

Ebay search results are often unrefined. I know, there's a whole slew of settings that you can use... most of which are uneffective.

Let's say I am looking for a PowerMac G4 Cube. The actual machine, *not* memory for it, or a power supply, or peripherals, or software for it. The search "powermac g4 cube" does not work well here, because it does include all the above. Queries like "mac g4 cube", "powermac g4 cube machine", etc, yield similar results. Narrowing things down by selecting the category "Apple, Macintosh computers" hardly has any effect either. ¹)

This problem is not easily solved. Selecting "Search title and description" returns even more bogus results. As we already saw, categories are useless (most likely because people lump their items in whatever old section to increase exposure). Yet, I don't like to have to wade through hundreds of items just to find a few that actually match the criteria I had in mind.

Sooo... I was wondering... maybe some sort of Bayesian filter would help here? You get a bunch of items and group them... this would match my criteria, this does not. It probably wouldn't be so useful if you are looking for a certain item but don't intend to search for it again once found and acquired. It might work better if you're, say, a collector, and are regularly looking for certain items (e.g. zoids, although those results tend to be more accurate).

What I would need is

• a query
• a script that crawls the eBay site periodically, using that query
• simple user interface that lets the user filter the results (and, after the initial training, makes educated guesses)

Of course, eBay doesn't like spiders crawling their site. Alternatively, one could set up an RSS feed and use that as input.

Thoughts welcome... :-)

¹) If there is some secret eBay-search-fu that I am not aware of, and that does give the correct results, narrowed down, then I'd like to hear more about it. :-)

Update 2008-03-03: It appears that eBay's developer program has been free since November. I recall it being virtually unusable before, but I will take another look at it, and see what I can do with it.

Update 2008-03-04: I'm currently doing some research in order to write some Chicken code that uses the API. (Talking to HTTP, and generating HTML and XML, seems easy enough. I am now trying to figure out which XML parser is the best.)

Update 2008-03-18: I have since written some proof-of-concept code, which produces SXML, but I'm kind of at a loss what to do next. Leaving the (simple) code as it is, is pretty lame, as a seasoned Schemer can easily write this themselves. On the other hand, second-guessing what the user would want to do with the XML doesn't sound like a good idea either. (The hard part was actually, signing up for the eBay developer program in all the right places, and getting all the right keys and IDs.)