Misleading Auctions and Search Problems

I mentioned this auction in a recent post:

The MYSTERY Of The TOLLING BELL NANCY DREW Keene DJ 1ST Item #270247821816

This was what I had to say about it:

This book closed at $41.00. I believe this seller was intentionally misleading buyers in the auction's title. "1ST" appears in the title of the listing while the description states that it is an early printing. The back panel of the dust jacket lists Cherry Ames to Veterans' Nurse, which makes makes it the second printing. The first printing dust jacket lists Beverly Gray #1-13 on the back panel and the back flap has an ad for the 4th Cherry Ames book.

I thought that was the end of it, but the book showed up for sale again!

The MYSTERY Of The TOLLING BELL NANCY DREW Keene DJ 1ST Item #270251328627

This time the book sold for $13.00. The pictures are identical and both descriptions are identical word for word. This just makes it even worse. What I think happened is that the winning bidder of the original listing realized after winning the auction that it was not the first printing and backed out. The seller then put the book back up for sale again and didn't take "1ST" out of the title, thereby misleading buyers again. The good news is that the second auction didn't go as high as the first one.

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I'm having trouble tracking completed auctions to see whether there are any unusual auction prices to report here. EBay completed items search is quite broken at the moment, or at the least, it is rather inconsistent. For instance, I just did a completed items search on Nancy Drew, and it has 1011 items as the total at the top of the first page but then 3551 total items at the top of the second page. I believe that there is a data corruption between eBay's different servers, so the results are different depending upon which server gives the results.

It has done this before several times before in the past, except with the current auctions, which is very bad. It is always a good idea, when running searches, to notice how many items are listed at the top of the page and see if it changes by more than a single-digit number from page to page. It will always fluctuate slightly, like 3551 to 3552, as items close or are listed. It shouldn't change by the hundreds or the thousands. If it changes by a large amount, you can reload the page repeatedly until you get the page that has the higher total at the top.

In fact, it is eBay's fault that I was able to purchase one of my first printing Nancy Drew dust jackets for a low price several years ago. It was Nancy's Mysterious Letter, in the second printing, which is the first printing dust jacket and the second printing book. That auction had an opening bid of $150.00, and I was the only bidder. The eBay search was very bad at that time, and it was doing what I described above. I believe that the book I won was one of the many listings that were dropped from some of the search pages, so many people missed it in their searches.