Deirdre
eBay Community Development

I'd like to run through two of the features of Pluck that can directly impact your eBay buying experience. The first is the Power Search and the second is what we call a Perch, which is geek talk for a Persistent Search

Let's start with a Power Search. Below is a screen shot of one:

The Power Search lets you quickly do a search on eBay for an item. With the 3 pane view, you can quickly scroll through a list of returned matches as well as a description of individual items. This has the advantage of being able to compare items against each other without having to hit the "back" button on Internet Explorer all the time. You can also search using the advanced searching options that you're used to using on eBay like price, category, and excluding certain words.

Lets take a closer look at some of the more advanced features afforded to you by a Power Search. Take a look at the picture above as a guide as I work through some of the details.

The first is the ability to sort and band results. Think Microsoft Outlook here. In Outlook 2003, mail is shown in "bands" like received today, received yesterday, one week ago, etc. You have the same functionality with Pluck. You can band results by price, as was done in the picture above. You can also band by any of the other columns that you can sort by, of which there are 9 to choose from. For example, you can band by number of bids, name, etc. You can even nest the banding. For example, you can first band by price, then within price band by number of bids. So no you can find an item that matches your query, is between $5 and $10, and has only 2 bids etc. Finally, we allow you to filter your results in real time. Simply type in your filter in the filter box at the top of the list and it will apply the filter in real time. When you've found your item, click on it to bring it up in the bottom right pane and place a bid

Now lets take a look at the Perch. As I mentioned earlier, a Perch stands for a persistent search. In many way's it's the more powerful of the two search tools we offer in Pluck. A Perch lets you set up a search, but it alerts you when a change has happened in your search. Take a look at the picture below to help guide you through the Perch

The best way to describe a Perch is by example. Here you can see that we did one for "iPod U2 edition". So far, it looks exactly like a Search result. Here's where it gets interesting. Every time an item changes, for example a new bid has been placed or a new item matches your criteria, the Perch is updated. Take a look at the highlighted item in yellow. Those are items that have changed since I last looked at this Perch I set up on my computer. So now I can track how an item trends in price, bid count, etc over time. When I'm ready to bid on an item, I simply click on it, it appears in the bottom right pane, and I place a bid.

Here are some tricks when using a Perch. First, you of course have to create a Perch. Next you "mark all as read" by clicking on the button immediately to the right of the filter box. Now all items are un-bolded. When a new item drops into the result set or changes, it will be bolded or highlighted in yellow, making it easy to see and track new items. Finally, you can create as many Perches as you want and keep them for as long as you desire.