Hack 1 Searching Feedback

Use your browser's Find tool to quickly find complaints or other specific feedback comments in a member's feedback profile.

Feedback is shown in chronological order, with the most recent feedback comments at the top. When scrutinizing a member's feedback profile, it's sometimes helpful to locate specific complaints that other members have left. Unfortunately, feedback profiles can get extremely long, and eBay provides no way of sorting or searching through a member's comments. The simple workaround is to use your browser's built-in search feature.

Start by scrolling down to the bottom of the user's feedback profile page. At the end of the list, you'll see page numbers, allowing you to see older comments. Further down, where it asks "How many feedback comments do you want on each page?" you can specify a larger number, thereby reducing the total number of pages. Choose 200, the maximum, and click View Feedback to show the new, longer page.

Next, press Ctrl-F (or go to Edit Find in this page) to activate your browser's search tool. To find negative feedback comments, type the word "complaint" in the search field and then click Find.

If the current page has a negative comment, your browser will locate it almost immediately. Click Find repeatedly to cycle through all the negative comments on the page.

In most browsers, you can leave the Find window open while you flip between pages in the feedback profile. Unfortunately, there's no way to show more than 200 feedback comments on a single page, which would obviously make the search even easier.

You can also search for neutral comments by looking for the word "neutral," and positive comments by looking for the word "praise."

You may also wish to search a person's feedback profile for your own user ID to see if you've left feedback for that person. Likewise, you can use the same technique to search your own feedback profile for another member's user ID to see if that member has left feedback for you.

See Chapter 8 for details on the eBay API, and ways to retrieve and search through feedback with only a few lines of code.