It's baaaaaaaaaccckkkkkk!

Thanks to readers for letting me know that eBay's BayEstimator utility is back online!  This is a great move by eBay to continue to give sellers the transparency they need to be successful on eBay.

I also noticed a new utility called eBaySaurus (no it's not a dinosaur, but more of a thesaurus).  This flash-based utility gives you a neat little graph (I believe it's what we would call a cluster graph in geekier circles).

Digg has had this kind of thing for a while called Swarm, and there are web search engines like Clusty with the same concept.

Here's an example of star wars where I drilled in and learned that star wars posters is one of the top searched items in the universe of star wars items.

Comments

[Walter]

Well, it's back, but it appears to have been neutered a bit. Blobs instead of percentages? Am I missing something? Sure, give us the tool back, but crippled a bit. Thanks!

[Jeff S]

eBaySaurus was fun to play with, but it clearly is working on old data, as old as a year ago. It works on "related searches" data, the links that show up under the search box (but above the returned results).

I know this because a search I monitor regularly is the phrase "custom stamp". In may 07, I was shopping for concert tickets, and I did it so often that I managed to singlehandly add the phrase "rush saratoga" to the related searches under "custom stamp". eBaySaurus showed the same connection today (the band Rush has no connection to custom stamps).

eBaySaurus is useful, but not 100% reliable or timely!