Ah yes, because as we all know you can copy text from pictures.

Also, thumbnail pictures don't mean a whole lot when they're either A) terrible, or B) you want to know it's condition.

yeah, well, I thought you just meant browsing, cuz that's what I was doing when I read your message.

I have a hard time not buying things from Mandarake. Like every week now. lol. I use the pictures to figure out what I'm looking at, I never rely on the titles. I mean, it's just gibberish to me anyway unfortunately. :(

With you on that, too many things end up catching my eye and my wallet does its sadness dance. Probably doesn't help that the first item on my bookmarks bar is a folder containing quick links to various searches like ryuki, figuarts, figma etc....

The deals are so good most of the time, even if you're just buying one thing. Plus SAL shipping is cheap, and I don't mind the wait. It's hard to beat. If it wasn't for Mandarake I would have much of a collection, there would be so many gaps. They make me want to buy things I wouldn't normally either.. lol. I'm still figuring them out though, I'm not sure how often their prices fluctuate. I've noticed in general they seem pretty aware of secondary market prices and sometimes aren't a great deal, but generally are well priced even after shipping.

Thing is, how can I browse when I can't spell what I'm browsing?

I can't spell Kamen Rider in Japanese Kanji on an English keyboard. So I search something in English I know will bring up KR stuff, like "SIC" and copy the Kanji for Kamen Rider.

Or you could, you know, google translate the simple words like rider and sentai. For anything more complicated just got to the shows wiki pages and copy/paste the title character name etc. Works great for me.

That's pretty much what I do, too. Except for those times I have to beg around here for kanji I can't find elsewhere.

for browsing figuarts, both 'shf' and 'figuart' works well, I've saved a few searches for other wide-ish terms, like various KR show names, and a simple 'mg' finds plenty of Gundam Master Grade results, so I'll brows through those, now with the big thumbnails to see what catches my eye.

If you're looking for a specific item in order to setup a search, browse through a general search to find the item, then open the detail page to see the full title to get the kanji you need.

Or that's how I do it, anyway.

Which is actually more work.

The whole point of this is not the ability to do it, which is never in question, but the ease of which it takes. Before it was simply look at the search results and find the Kanji there. Now I have to actually go to item pages. Not the end of the world by any strech, merely tedious when I'm searching multiple things, but doable. Now you're suggesting I take more time to translate or seek out the text elsewhere? I think the point got lost along the way in this conversation.

That's what I do now, and before this change, the bolded part wasn't part of the process.

I'm not trying to make it out like it's a huge deal, but I'm not sure what I'm saying is clear.

It's extra weird when you consider the new format for search results doesn't, like, save space since all the results are the same size as before. It literally just removes text for no reason, making searching just a teensy bit more tedious.