[NTLK] HI there! Searching for a FirstFone

[Matthias Melcher]

On 04.12.2010, at 06:58, Aaron Brigati wrote:

> 
> On Dec 3, 2010, at 10:05 PM, Dennis B. Swaney wrote:
>> 
>> I believe that eBay thinks that "FirstFone" is a typo for "Firestone" so 
>> it automatically changes the the search to the latter. The same thing 
>> happens if you manually type in the top level eBay address and then do a 
>> search for "FirstFone".
>> 
>> Pretty arrogant programming on eBay's part since there are tons of 
>> uncommon model names for items people want to sell or buy.
> 
> To the best of my knowledge, ebay only does things like that if there are no matches for the actual search term that you entered. So if there WAS A FirstFone, it should show up.

Not sure about that, but for a while EBay auctions could be cheated by searching for items in a slightly misspelled wording. By doing this, one could find auctions that nobody was bidding for and hence "cheat" the seller and buy at minimum price.

Since spelling has become a forgotten skill, EBay probably has introduced this one-off correction to avoid complaints by spelling impaired sellers.

Maybe if you type FistVone, EBay might auto-correct you to FirstFone?