SimonW

17 hours ago, kirispupis said:

FWIW, I've implemented several production searches in my career. The largest one was basically a contact search where individuals could use address, office number, phone number (or just the extension), name (either just the first name, last name, both, or last name first), and numerous other fields. Total database size was in the hundreds of millions of records and was queried several million times a day.

In that one, data entry was also non-uniform and a type of state machine was used to normalize data and try to figure out what the user is asking for before we performed the search, which was basically a ranked index search (though we had several indexes for different searches).

Note that, in my experience, users shouldn't be expected to understand the format of the data they're looking for. I believe it's reasonable for a user to state that they're entering a catalog reference or date range, but expecting the types of searches listed elsewhere generally results in lost customers. In our case, there was just one search field and we had to figure out what they wanted first. Given that this was a mission-critical system for many Fortune 500 companies, I heard about it if the results weren't correct.

I have no doubt that you have the expertise. The problem, however, is that we don't have the same resources that your company must have had building a system critical for many other companies. For this reason, my call to let me know if anyone has not only good ideas, but also isn't afraid of helping with the work it takes to implement them.

17 hours ago, kirispupis said:

For me, lately I've been focusing on Greek cities from a specific time period, and it's annoying when I search for a city to understand how frequent its types are and the frequency of each type, and the results are cluttered with Roman provincials.

Can you provide an example? I am sure that you can improve the results by optimizing your search term using the right operators.

On 11/21/2022 at 1:11 PM, Ed Snible said:

@kirispupis asks for automatic detection of duplicates, and die duplicates, which is a major unsolved research problem and depends on the existence of a database of auctions -- a database that doesn't exist.

That database may never exist if we don't build it now.

There are multiple archives, at least for the major auctions of the past 2 decades. I don't think there will ever be one that covers all numismatic auctions for two reasons: 1) copyrights and 2) it's a huge amount of work to digitize printed catalogs.

On 11/21/2022 at 1:11 PM, Ed Snible said:

It would be easy now for an individual to download PDF catalogs from dealer sites, and to "print as PDF" or save in a database the coins appearing on VCoins and eBay.  Yet as far as I know no one is doing that.  (Perhaps some folks are doing that but can't discuss it because of copyright reasons?). The technical work isn't hard -- a script could do it -- but it is boring.

Collecting all sales records online is probably not as easy as you think. Creating a crawler for a single website is easy and quickly done, I agree. But if you have to create and maintain individual crawlers for many different websites (keep in mind that they don't store the entire site like Google, etc. does, but need to extract certain data and feed it into a database) the amount of work quickly grows. Especially when they have a lot of code updates and/or use JavaScript.

21 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

As far as I know, all the auctions on biddr stay online. @SimonW, is that correct?  Just go to https://www.biddr.com/closed and narrow down by auction house using the dropdown.

For now, yes. But please keep in mind that biddr is not an auction archive. It's an auction platform and old records may get removed at some point for performance reasons. This is where acsearch and all the other auction archives come into play 🙂 

20 hours ago, Ed Snible said:

I purchased coins on pecunum.com between 2013-2016.  That entire trove of data is gone.

Pecunem was only the auction platform, not the auction house. The auction houses that used Pecunem were Numismatik Naumann (formerly Gitbud & Naumann) and Solidus Numismatik. The auctions of both of them can be found on acsearch and other auction archives.

20 hours ago, Ed Snible said:

Of course, not every auction is on biddr.  Frank Robinson's catalogs go away when the next auction is loaded.  If someone sold me a coin and said it was ex-Frank Robinson Auction 80, it would be hard to verify even with the printed black and white catalogs.

Frank's auctions have been available on biddr for the past 3 years. And for the same time their data has been collected for acsearch, although not (yet) visible to the public. We are collecting the auction data of more auction houses than you may be aware of. This data is either not publicly available because we haven't asked the copyright holder(s) for permission yet, or because we weren't granted permission when we did ask them in the past. We still collect it in case we get permission at any time in the future.

20 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

The acsearch image search isn't a machine learning or neural network type thing (which to my mind is what's really needed for this purpose), it's hard coded based on matching outlines.

That's correct. The search basically works like a text search, but instead of text it uses certain image features to search an index of image features. Since the image search has been mentioned quite a few times, please note that everyone with a premium account has 5 free image searches per day included.

19 hours ago, kirispupis said:

...because their "normal" search is too basic. That's the major reason I haven't become a paying member as I just don't see the current functionality as valuable...

Quite the contrary, the search allows very complex queries if you use it correctly. It's often not the search that is limited but the understanding of the individual using it. Please read the How to.

19 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Search by catalog reference. Right now this is a basic string search and mostly useless.

The search by catalog reference is easily achievable with the proximity search operator as described in the other thread.

19 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Be smart enough to know similar catalog references. Many coins are listed by multiple services. If I search for one, understand that the others may match too.

That would be a nice feature. It's basically a Thesaurus for catalog references. Although I see some potential problems (e.g. one catalog reference may be broader [cover multiple types] than another and, thus, lead to a less effective search). So this would need to be an option you can turn on/off.

As an alternative, search for one reference to see what other references there are and then use the group operator to search for all references you found at once.

19 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Understand debated attributions. For example, coins from Myos and Myndos often have identical catalog references (such as SNG Copenhagen 1022). Therefore, if I search for Myos I should receive Myndos and the other cities these are often attributed to.

I agree, it would be nice if the search knew all this and automatically searched for both. I even think a conditional Thesaurus wouldn't be too hard to implement. The only problem is that all this knowledge would have to be fed in first, for all numismatic areas.

As an alternative, you can achive the same with the group operator, if you have the knowledge.

19 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Include highlights for known fakes. Right now these are often removed by auction houses but remain in search results. It would be great to keep them in the results, but put a red border or other designation on them. This could be crucial when searching for coins.

The problem is that fakes are usually removed because of certain legal implications. And if they haven't been removed before the data enters the archives, I imagine that an auction house won't be uber happy if we put a big red border around the fakes they had in their auctions. In the end, it's their data and they decide if it stays in the archive or not. There's a fine line.

17 hours ago, Ed Snible said:

When I signed up for acsearch, more than 10 years ago, I clicked to agree to the terms.  I assume the terms I agreed to then are similar to the current terms, which say "2.1 Any intervention in the function or manipulation of the website is forbidden to the highest degree. This in particular includes ... the use of so called web scrapers, web robots and other software for the systematic collection of data and content ..."

Without the data it is hard to create and test software to analyze the data!

I have never asked Simon Wieland for permission to access his data.  I don't have time to work on this project seriously.  Perhaps someone could approach him to see if he would be willing to sell programmatic access to his non-price data to companies and non-profits doing research and new product design.

The data of acsearch is what makes it valuable and, thus, is not sold or given away in its entirety. But I believe you won't need 10 million auctions records. I am happy to provide a good sample (I believe 1% is more than enough) to anyone who is interested.

17 hours ago, kirispupis said:

My hope with the suggestions is that the owners of ACSearch or CoinArchives pick them up, or someone else does. It really has to be a labor of love, since there aren't enough ancient coin collectors to justify the expense.

I think that's the main problem. I like many of your ideas, but who is going to put in the all the work? If anyone is willing to get their hands dirty and put in some actual work (e.g. by manually labeling data to train an AI model), let me know. I am the first one who will support you 🙂 

I am starting this thread since I didn't want to let all the great comments here unanswered. Please feel free to post feedback, discuss ideas, etc. in this thread.

When did this thread become about acsearch? 🙂 I am happy to answer all questions and listen to ideas for improvments. I do, however, not want to hijack @mordehaus thread about his new application and will, thus, keep my answer short. Please be assured that I have read all comments and ideas, nonetheless. If you have further questions, ideas or feedback, please open a new thread and I will gladly jump on it. 

One search operator that is very powerful and barely used is the proximity search operator described here (https://www.acsearch.info/howto.html). When I am searching for a certain catalog reference (e.g. Hadrian RIC 9), my search query looks like this: Hadrian "RIC 9"~2. This ensures that the search only returns results were RIC and 9 are no further away from each other than 2 words, which works amazingly good. If you add the denomination on top of that, you will almost certainly have mainly perfect matches (as long as the descriptions are correct). There are many other helpful search operators. Check out the How to page on acsearch.

Naville, unfortunately, insist on doing their auctions manually, meaning that the speed and timing constantly change.

@Jay GT4, can you send us a message through our contact form with the bids that didn't execute so that I can look into this?

Here's another mystery. Some years ago I purchased the following two provincial Tesserae. Both very thin and light, which - in comination with their style and fabric - is the reason I would place them in the 3-4 century AD. They remind me of the (much smaller) Tesserae from Nicopolis ad Istrum (?) showing different obverse motivs combined with three stars and crescent on the reverse, all holed (I plan to show some of them later on in this thread).

Anonymous, Tessera (17-19 mm, 1.45 g), Asia Minor, uncertain, 3rd-4th century AD (?).
Obv. Rooster standing left; above, dolphin swimming left; in front, grain ear. Rev. Blank.

Anonymous, Tessera (18-20 mm, 0.92 g), Asia Minor, uncertain, 3rd-4th century AD (?).
Obv. Lion standing left; above, amphora containig grain ears or flowers (?); below, round shield. Rev. Blank.

Only recently I was able to purchase a third one, clearly from the same series, but with a Julian-Claudian (?) portrait:

Anonymous, Tessera (20 mm, 1.20 g), Asia Minor, uncertain, 3rd-4th century AD (?).
Obv. Julian-Claudian head, laureate, left (Tiberius?); left, crayfish (?); right, dolphin. Rev. Blank.

I wasn't able to locate any of them in the major literature. Does anyone here have another piece of this highly interesting series or has ever seen any in any numismatic publication?

I was told that the coin was first with Bucephalus were a picture was taken and added to the next auction file. The consignor, however, then decided to consign it to Numismad and Bucephalus forgot to remove the coin from their auction file. They have now removed the coin.

Both Numismad and Bucephalus have been very responsibly in the past. I am sure there's a simple explanation to it. I'll let you know as soon as I hear back from them.

Thank you, @ambr0zie, that explains it. I already started to search the trash and spam folders as I thought we may have missed your message 🙂

Please note that the "Report error" form will send your message to the auction house. If you would like to reach out to us, please use the contact form instead.

28 minutes ago, ambr0zie said:

BTW @SimonW- really appreciate your quick intervention on the thread. This proves Biddr does not tolerate things like this.

A responsible and trustworthy environment is of particular importance to us. We, thus, always try to resolve issues like this as quickly as possible.

9 hours ago, DonnaML said:

Does Biddr check new auction companies out before allowing them to use Biddr as a platform?

We definitely do. If the company is not a well-known and established auction house, we ask not only for commercial register excerpts and proof of identity, but also for trade references and check whether the person(s) has/have been active in coin trading before and has/have the necessary experience. Of course, there is always a certain residual risk with new companies.

Thank you for bringing this up @Harry G. We will look into it.

@ambr0zie, did you send an email or contact us through the web form? We haven't received any message regarding this so far.

Thank you everyone for the nice comments on acsearch. I am happy it is helpful to some here. There have been a few minor updates lately. Besides the one @Severus Alexander already mentioned, the most important one is probably the revised bookmark list, where you can now choose between list and gallery view and change the order of the items via drag & drop.

16 hours ago, Aleph said:

If you assume this is legionary connected, then perhaps the animals are an eagle and a bull, both commonly associated with the legions?  The Reverse looks much more like a bull to me than a dog, but the bird is more of a stretch to see an eagle.

I do as I have no other explanation for LEG X[I]V. Although I agree that a bull would make more sense, I think the head is too big (in relation to the rest of the body) for a bull. It looks a bit like a French bulldog to me 🙂 

16 hours ago, Aleph said:

I would guess a 2nd century date.

I agree, I'd say it's early 2nd century.

21 hours ago, Aleph said:

Very nice Mars/cornucopia quadrans!

Thank you, @Aleph.

11 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

I have gathered that the legions sometimes issued tesserae as promissory notes for food or money, or as a sort of pass-to-enter (from an article in a journal @Qcumbor kindly sent me: Revue Numismatique No. 1, "Retour sur les tessères de plomb au nom de Jules César provenant des Fosses Mariennes (Arles)" by Roland Raynaud, pp. 17-23).  When you ask about their purpose, @SimonW, I assume you're looking for something more specific to your neat raven/bull piece?

Thank you very much, @Severus Alexander. Now that is interesting. I've never heard of this before. I'll try to find the article and will look into it.

The following Tessera is a bit of a mistery to me and seems to be unrecorded in the major literature.

Anonymous, Tessera (15 mm, 2.18 g), Rome, 1st-2nd century AD.
Obv. LEG / XIV (?), raven standing right. Rev. AP / [...], dog standing right.

There are two similar pieces, but with LEG XV:

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=6840687
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=9777536

The second piece shows that the reverse has some letters in the exergue, too, although I can not tell which exaclty (except for an S maybe).

What I find odd is both the variation of the legion (XIV & XV, while everything else seems to be identical) and the choice of animals (raven and dog).

Does anyone have any further information or an idea what the purpose was, why it shows a raven and a dog, what the full reverse legend is (or could be) and what it means?

9 hours ago, znmto said:

I am dismayed that you acknowledge your post as off-topic and still double down and persist in preaching your ideology.

It is a very slippery slope into politics, which has been the death-knell of many online communities.

It would be a shame to count this one among them, especially given how young it is.

Discussions on the ethics of bidding should be allowed in my opinion.

Even political discussions per se are not a problem as long as the interaction is respectful and other opinions are tolerated. @Severus Alexander is one of the most respectful and considerate people I know. In that context, a little digression should be fine 🙂 

9 hours ago, Coinmaster said:

What is it? Never seen this anonymous type!

It shows Tiber crowned with reeds on the obverse and she-wolf with twins on the reverse (RIC 18). The Tiber/she-wolf group is one of the rarest among the anonymous Quadrantes. There are multiple subtypes with both Tiber left and right, she-wolf left and right (as well as some other smaller variations). Within this group, Tiber left is much rarer than Tiber right. Although RIC says "only" R, this is the first piece with Tiber left that I see offered on the market since I started collecting fractions about 15 years ago.

9 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

@SimonW and @Tejas, thanks for engaging with my thinking on this ethical issue. 🙂 I'll be interested to hear what you think when I elaborate a bit more, if you care to respond further.

@Severus Alexander, I'll send you a PM later today 🙂 

3 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

I'm very glad you got your must-have fraction, @SimonW! 🙂

Thank you very much, @Severus Alexander 🙂 And congratulations on your great Tarsos Alex Tetradrachm!

3 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

As opposed to when the comparatively well-heeled bid up a coin just so they don't have to wait a bit longer, or worse, just on a whim.  One should consider the consequences for those less well-heeled than oneself in doing this, IMO.  There are ethics involved in buying.

I'd disagree on this one. A free market economy doesn't work this way. But more importantly: who is to decide who (the well-heeled or the less well-heeled buyer) "deserves" a coin and who should or should not be bidding?

3 hours ago, Severus Alexander said:

I see a few comments up there suggesting that some of us paid more than we were prepared to.  How about... not doing that?  Perhaps that might help prices settle down a bit? 😉

Good question, @Severus Alexander. I can't talk for others, but I am just not that disciplined 🙂 That's why I don't set myself a "hard" limit in the first place. Instead, I usually have a rough range in mind. Many times I even go beyond that and keep bidding until I feel the next bid realy hurts. This said, I usually don't regret the coins I've bought, but the ones I didn't.

It also greatly depends on the coin. Is it one that I "must have" or one that would be "nice to have". In the area I collect and try to complete, there are many rare types that only turn up on the market every 10, 20 or so years and I usually don't want to risk to wait that long before I'll get another chance to buy one at an even higher price.

I bought some of the fractions in that sale. Here is the one that was the "must have" coin for me this time:

@Al Kowsky, the Hadrian Sestertius is believed to be from dies engraved by the sculptor Antoninianos of Aphrodisias. It's without any doubt one of the most artistic portraits on a roman coin. And it's the most expensive Sestertius ever sold.

Here is one of my favorite portraits of Vespasian:

Vespasian, AD 69-79. Denarius (3.41 g), Rome, AD 77-78.
Obv. CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG, laureate head of Vespasian right. Rev. IMP - XIX, modius filled with grain ears. Cohen 216; BMC 216; BNC 190; RIC 980.

Thank you very much, @Valentinian!

Yet another Mars from the same series, although of completely different style and with a another reverse:

Anonymous, Quadrans (15 mm, 2.98 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Bust of Mars, helmeted, r., cuirassed and draped, seen from behind Rev. S – C, cornucopiae. RIC 23.

Here's another rare Quadrans I was lucky enough to find. It was well hidden in a multiple lot in an auction of Jean Elsen. I've never seen another one for sale.

The obverse shows Mars, but I also see (or believe to see) some features of A. Pius, which would support Joseph van Heesch's theory that (almost) all of the anonymous fractions were minted under A. Pius.

Anonymous, Quadrans (18 mm, 3.63 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Bust of Mars, helmeted, r., draped. Rev. S – C, aquila flanked by two standards. RIC 22.

On 10/6/2022 at 4:48 PM, KenDorney said:

I have a number of the usual suspects, but this is my most interesting piece (in desperate need of a new photo, but good enough for now):

That's a great coin, @KenDorney! And one that isn't tooled for once (many of the mine coins are, unfortunately). Looking forward to seeing your "usual suspects", too 🙂 

That's a very cool variation I was not even aware of, @Aleph! And I agree, the bold tripod is very distinct (it looks a bit like a table 🙂) and deserves its own (sub-)reference. I found a total of 4 of them online: yours, one sold by Roma last year and two on numismatics.org. I believe they are all from the same pair of dies. Have you looked at yours under a microscope? It has some signs of a cast, I am afraid.

The fun thing about fractions is that there are lots and lots of unrecorded variations that you only start to see once you dig into the matter. Here is another one that involves a tripod:

While the griffon / tripod type usually has a globe on top of the tripod (see second picture), the following Quadrans shows one without.

Anonymous, Quadrans (2.37 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Griffon r., resting front left paw on wheel. Rev. S – C, tripod. RIC 27 var. (globe on tripod).

Anonymous, Quadrans (17 mm, 3.77 g), Rome, 81-161 AD.
Obv. Griffon r., resting front left paw on wheel. Rev. S – C, tripod with globe. RIC 27.

3 hours ago, Aleph said:

These monogram tesserae are very cool but difficult to collect.  In total there 12 types, 4 with the ship, 4 with VL, and 4 with TR, all die linked.  The best reference for these is Dancoisne, from the 19th century who publishes 10 of the types as line drawings.  I have been looking for these for 15+ years and have managed to get 8 of the types.  The prices however have begun to skyrocket.☹️

Unfortunately, I don't have Dancoisne and didn't find it online either. But here are the 12 subtypes I have seen so far in the online archives:

Galley / D
Galley / G
Galley / T
Galley / V

TR / C
TR / D (sometimes with a THR [ligate] countermark)
TR / G
TR / blank

VL / M
VL / N
VL / P
VL / blank

Are those the same that are in Dancoisne (+2 others)? I see how you can find die links between the galley and the TR type, but what about the VL type?

And do you have any idea what the TR, VL and the single letters (C, D, G, M, N, P, T, V) stand for?

I've never seen this bust type for Elagabal. There's definitely a market for rare Elagabal Tetras:

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=2663184
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5572026