ebay Auction Tracking: The Next Step

It’s been a while since I last wrote about ebay Auction Tracking. Probably, that’s because nothing has happened in that space. It just works.

My goal has always been adding value to what you can do yourself with searches on ebay. That value would be that my list directly cuts through the millions of things on ebay to the 10 or 15 that are relevant to our feature cars.

I have achieved that through much manual effort over the almost 15 months since I started the tracking. Most every day (sometimes twice) I log onto ebay and search for relevant auctions. I have done it on holidays and while away on vacation. I have done it while out of town on business.

When I was at Carlisle 2008, I talked about ebay auction tracking with some of the folks. Ken (Cobra2top) was among them and when I mentioned that I did most of the searching manually he said he was surprised to hear that. He thought I had it automated. After I thought about it, I was surprised at that myself. I am a huge advocate of automation.

Looking ahead to my next business trip I started wishing for more automation. It can be tricky to integrate maintaining a personal web site into a schedule which involves focusing on trip-related activities morning, afternoon and night.

So, over the holidays I set to work on automating what is inherently a process that involves human intelligence – taking a keyword search as allowed on ebay and sorting through the results to parse out only those that are really correct.

Today I have implemented my first cut at that. Each hour a program on this site will search ebay for auctions that are relevant. I don’t expect it to be perfect. It will miss some that should be posted and post some that should not be posted. It might take some time to tune it so it gets better and I fully expect that it will always still take some level of manual effort on most days.

Now you know that if you start seeing entries that don’t quite fit that I haven’t lost my mind. The algorithm is a precise computer program working against a set of listings where words have been misspelled and data has been sometimes incorrectly and/or incompletely entered.

At least now I can step away from it for a period of 5 days or so and it won’t look like I totally gave up on it.