Track those goods, prices on eBay

Customers of online auction giant eBay can now take advantage of two new technologies designed to unearth detailed search, pricing and product information from the site's data stores.

The San Jose, Calif., company on Tuesday launched Pulse, a tool it describes as a "daily barometer" that aims to provide up-to-the-minute statistics on buying and selling trends among its auctions. The application, which will be updated every 24 hours, aggregates auction data such as pricing information into a central portal to give eBay users a better idea of just how much certain items are selling for.

Also on Tuesday, Net research firm Terapeak launched a data mining application for use with eBay. Terapeak Smart Search is an analytical software engine that gathers data from closed auctions on eBay to offer customers market context.

"We'd been using eBay to sell software, and it was hard to understand why things sold well sometimes and not so well at others," said Anthony Sukow, Terapeak's chief executive. "We wanted to create a stock-market type approach to analyzing eBay so people could run their businesses more effectively."

Born from the auction experiences of company co-founders and brothers Anthony and Andrew Sukow, Terapeak's tool is meant to provide an easy way for eBay sellers to determine which auction categories are performing well and to garner up-to-the-minute pricing data for items sold via eBay. The system also allows people to view eBay's most successful sellers in a given category or time frame. So far, the system covers 16 of eBay's 32 product categories.

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