The iPad Winner Is...

Jan Kahrs from Hays.  Jan said she "is an avid Nex-Tech Classifieds user who over the years has purchased and sold many items.  I love this free community service.  Me and my family are so excited to win this Christmas surprise, thank you Nex-Tech".

Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming "Invite Friends" contests.  Thank you to all who helped us launch this new feature this month.

New Updates

With feedback from our users we have made a couple of changes to our new search.  You now have the option to search the "Entire Country" and this option will be saved so you don't have to choose it every time.

We also fixed a bug we introduced last week.  The option to save your category count (25, 50..) was lost but it is now back.

If you see any other issues or have ideas please pass them along, info@nextechclassifieds.com.

New Search!

It's been about 17 months since the relaunch of the new Nex-Tech Classifieds website, and every day since then I've been wanting to do something better with the search.  Tonight I finally get that chance.  We will be taking the site down tonight around midnight to upgrade the site with new search features.

New Features

• Location based search
• More relevant results
• Search plural words
• Search synonyms

How does it work?

The search bar at the top of the page will have a couple more options after tonight.  The most noticable options are the location and distance.  Let's say you live in Hays, Kansas and you want to search for a car, but you wouldn't want to travel farther than 50 miles.  Your location should already be filled in and the default distance is 50 miles so you should only need to enter the word 'car' into the search box.  Click search and you will only see cars within the distance you chose.  It's pretty simple once you see it.

The location box should automatically detect your general location or get it from your profile.  In most cases you shouldn't have to enter anything.  If the location is wrong you might check your information in 'My Account' and change your city if necessary. 

Displaying relevant search terms has been a real problem in the past.  No one wants to look through tons of theater equipment when they searched for a 'heater'.  This is no longer a problem.  Plural words are a little complicated but the new system handles them like a champ.  If you search for the word 'mice' as in 'computer mice' it will also return results for 'mouse'.

Farmers will greatly benefit from synonym searches.  There are many peices of equipment that have multiple names depending on who you ask.  A swather to one person could be a windrower to another.  The new search is intelligent enough to know that they are the same thing.  Right now these are the only words it knows about so let us know what other synonyms we could throw at it.

Personal Note

I'm glad that I finally had the chance to provide these features to our users. Give the new search a try and let us know what you think by emailing us at info@nextechclassifieds.com or leaving a comment right here on the blog.

Place An Ad Page Upgrade

Tomorrow morning we will be making a few changes to the “Place An Ad” page.  We have been paying attention to usage patterns and found some things that need to be different.

• The details area where you put the description of your item will be much cleaner.  We removed some of the formatting buttons which helps dramatically.  This wasn’t just for aesthetic value though.  For security reasons we need to limit the formatting available.
• The title will now be limited to sixty characters.  This will only affect a small number of users who use all of the available real estate today.  If you edit a current listing with more than sixty characters you will be shown an error letting you know you need to cut it down to sixty.
• Our category chooser has a new look.  It is intended to be much easier to use.  We are also going to start limiting the number of available categories from three to two.  We originally allowed three categories but now that we have so many more categories and sub categories most items only have one logical category to be placed in.  This change will only affect 3% of the current listings.

 If you have any questions or comments about these upgrades please comment on the blog or e-mail me at info@nextechclassifieds.com.

New Scammer Threat

It is that time again…  time to discuss scammers.  Earlier today we had an event we were not expecting.  We had a scammer sign up as a business user and post a listing of a Jeep.  We believe they used a stolen credit card to get through the signup process.  We get personal scammers everyday but this was the first one to sign up as a business.  The reason for this post is twofold.

• We want to thank our users for having the awareness to report this listing as bad within just a few minutes of it being posted.  This made sure we didn’t have anyone getting taken advantage of and possibly losing money.
• We also want to once again remind users to always be cautious.  We remove scammers every day but they are like cockroaches.. they just never die.  If an item is too good to be true you should report it as bad just to make sure.  We try very hard to make sure scammers don’t do damage but we cannot be 100%.  It is up to you to protect yourself.

If you have any questions or comments regarding scammers please reply to this blog or e-mail me at info@nextechclassifieds.com.