I also am bothered by this piece of new search. Be wonderful if ebay would work out the bugs before they dump it on us. Any case, here is a somewhat clumsy but doable fix for those of us using the Firefox browser and searching by newly listed down to the 1st item of our last search. I keep a dedicated tab for my most important search. When I've completed the search I go back to the top of the list and leave the 1st item highlighted (red). I then switch to a different tab for other browsing. The next time I do the #1 search I go back to its tab, check the highlighted item (it stays highlighted as long as I leave the tab alone), and search till I get to that item (which is no longer red, but I can usually remember which it is). Hope you follow. Be nice if they ever give us back the highlight, but oh well... Grey

> Thanks for the advice, Grey. I'll definitely have to check it out.
>
> When I spoke to another Ebay operator yesterday, he told me that his co-workers told him that it was PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE to fix this problem. That was his answer, pure and simple. Basically I went on a rampage and told him that they fixed a website that was NOT BROKEN! I have been using Ebay since 1999 and this has never been a problem. I am so sick and tired of Ebay's ineffectiveness and poor customer service. He told me that he would forward my complaint to the tech department but we all know that nothing will be rectified.

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As techies like rockboss2000 have said, the reason the visited links don't stay highlighted/change color (which has been the behavior of visited links since the dawn of the internet) is because the url of the item listing changes after you view it and go back to the search results screen. Making the url for a static page stay the same should not exactly be rocket science: but look at an ebay auction page url: used to end in the item # Now it's got so much extraneous stuff that serves who knows what mysterious purpose.

There have been a few other threads on this issue on the board that have more of the techie part of the issue described: you may want to do a search for them: of course the upgraded discussion boards Search is even worse than the New Search Experience! or the New eBay Motors Search! You may just want to scan this board's first 3 or 4 pages (with 50 items per page as default--it is your default right? and you should be able to locate them.

I'm trying to keep this thread relevant because the operator claims that nobody else has complained about this issue. I told him to read the forum but they clearly don't.

Apparently ebay phone support doesn't know everything.

I think you mean anything!

> I am so sick of this problem! I call Ebay everyday to report it but to no avail. Now I received a condescending email saying that I have to adjust my history settings on Firefox. I have been using Ebay since 1999 and have never had this sort of problem. Then all of a sudden it happens to everyone and they think we're total idiots that do not know how to change our internet settings? We'll see who the real morons are when bidding starts to diminish. Nobody I know, including myself, wants to sit on the computer for hours viewing items we already saw one hour ago.

This is the one MUST FIX item in the "new & improved" search. I've already wasted many hours looking at duplicate items again and again. I also have about a thousand purchases on eBay and have been able to deal with all the changes until now. By forcing so many unique item links, what would normally show as visited across four or five of my daily searches (out of about 50), I now see the same item as unvisited.

I've already quit searching stores because of the search changes. At least I don't spend as much time on eBay anymore. It's sad since I had quite a few store purchases, but it's just too hard now. This should be easy. There is no valid reason to create unique links across different searches starting from different places. There are a number of ways to deal with it. This is what cookies are for.

eBay needs to fix this and fix it asap. Every day it's broken is another day they're losing fees from me not buying things.

> This is the one MUST FIX item in the "new & improved" search.
>
> I've already quit searching stores because of the search changes. This should be easy. There is no valid reason to create unique links across different searches starting from different places. There are a number of ways to deal with it. This is what cookies are for.

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This was MarniSue's explanation to me: is this an odd way of tracking users's search habits? Can cookies perform the same function?

"To answer your question as to why we have different URLs for the same page, it is usually for tracking purposes. In order to gauge if you came from a saved search, or a keyword search or a specific page in search so that we can better hone the experience to meet the needs of the majority of users."
Now I don't know if I'm in the majority of users that they want to hone their "experience" for or in the minority. It would seem to me that having a search that meets the needs of all your users would be one where you can easily and quickly keyword search for auction and fixed priced listings and have them sorted in a rational manner in a list that is easy to navigate (i.e. you can at least get to page 2 of the results).

The cynical part of me thinks that they are "honing the experience" to meet the needs of certain of their sellers.

She also mentioned that:

"The visited links issue is being treated as a high priority issue. That said, it is fairly complex to fix, so we want to make sure we take the time to get it right. We hope to have it fixed on the site by the end of this week."
That was on Tuesday.

Clemsmom, once again you cut right to the bottom-line: it doesn't matter if we can work around it, if it isn't happening to us, or only some of the time, the bottom-line is: if search isn't working (in any of the myriad ways that have been documented) when the potential bidder and buyer is doing the search for OUR items WE (ebay's actual customers) have lost out.

This is something that has been a real issue and real controversy at the Betsy sight where that sight's clueless owners picked a fight with gooooogle by fouling up their users' listing titles and meta data when it was loaded into Goooogle Base. The sellers there could see a direct correlation with page views and actual sales and when the sight changes were being made. I guess ebay is so big and its code is so convoluted after 14 years and they have such little regard for us that they think they can just keep repeating "90% of our users love it" or on the british site: "96% of users love it" (new search). I'm not kidding they used 96%.

Misspellings are intentional and directed with love for the bots that scurry through these boards.