The Grinch who stole eBay?

December 8, 2000 12:51 PM

The Grinch who stole eBay? Here's a weird one; help cheerfully accepted. The link is to a search on eBay for Novatel Minstrel's; I decided I wanted to buy one. Everywhere I run the search from, I get substantially different results. Like, 2 answers vs 12. I'd be interested to know if other people who hit the link see similar behavior... This smells weird... kinda like the Amazon differential pricing think, but I can't see a reason why...
posted by baylink (8 comments total)

I'm wondering if this could be address, browser or OS based; I didn't see that I had *any* cookies in my file from eBay...
posted by baylink at 12:52 PM on December 8, 2000

Maybe it's one of those phase-of-the-moon things.
posted by rodii at 12:56 PM on December 8, 2000

WinNT4

IE5.5, Netscape4.7 & 6, Opera 5: The same 2 results
posted by Mick at 12:57 PM on December 8, 2000

i get the same results, but if i go to the front page and type minstrel in the search box, i get 122 results. odd...
posted by phunkone at 1:06 PM on December 8, 2000

The front page search box is not category restricted.

I generated that URL by trimming the results of entering 'minstrel' into a title and description search of category "Photo & Electronics"; I should have mentioned that too...
posted by baylink at 1:38 PM on December 8, 2000

It's not just you, I've had different results in the last two days searching for fingerprint scanning devices. Can't explain it though., might be a hiccup in the search engine.
posted by monkeyboy at 5:34 PM on December 8, 2000

One way to test if it's OS dependant/your location dependant is to run it through spaceproxy. Either go to their site and go to eBay from there, or you can simply tack on http://spaceproxy.com/-_- directly before the real address. Then it'll go through their proxy server first.
posted by grank at 8:15 PM on December 8, 2000

It's not a hiccup. eBay's search engine has always been a little flaky on me.
posted by aaron at 1:23 PM on December 10, 2000