[meteorite-list] eBay Trickery - How to exclude China from search results
Michael Gilmer
meteoritemike at gmail.com
Thu Jan 18 20:08:28 EST 2024
Hi Listees and Collectors,
A long time ago, eBay gave you more options for filtering a seller's
location in the results.
Now, you can search the US, North America, Worldwide, or within a
specified mile-radius distance. You no longer have an option to search
by country or to easily exclude China from results. Or....do you?
I used to like searching just European dealers, but if you try that
now, your only option is to select "worldwide" and wade through a ton
of Chinese listings.
I found a way around this by deconstructing the URL of a given set of
search results.
Let's try it.
I searched for "meteorite" with "US Only" selected for the item
location. The URL of the results is :
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524.m570.l1313&_nkw=meteorite&_sacat=0&rt=nc&_odkw=meteorite+-tektite&_osacat=0&_sop=10&LH_PrefLoc=1&LH_All=1
A lot of junk there that is not of interest to us. But, notice the
string of characters "PrefLoc" - this stuck out to me. PREFerred
LOCation methinks. The value is set to "=1", so I started changing
this number.
Apparently, the following numbers are valid :
0 = no change?
1 = US
2 = Worldwide
3 = North America
4 = no change?
5 = EU
6 = China
7+ = error
Changing the "=1" to "=5" brings back only items located in Europe
with no Chinese listings!
Any number higher that 6 results in an "invalid item location" error.
Enjoy!
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