Peggy Losey believes she hit the jackpot three weeks ago, when she found some old plates shaped like lettuce leaves. She recognized the markings a type of Majolica pottery she’d seen on an antiques television show. Because they had tiny chips on the edges, she paid just $10 for 15 pieces. When listing the items for auction on eBay, she acknowledged the defects, fearing the wrath of buyers and the harm to her all-important user feedback rating if she did not. She auctioned off the plates for $1,419. Coming just weeks after her husband’s lay-off, it amounted to winning a jackpot. “I was just running around the house yelling, ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’” Christian Godfrey is more sanguine about eBay. “There is no jackpot,” Godfrey said. “It’s just another way to sell.” Still, he drove 12 hours with his wife, Kathy, 37, from their home in Idaho Falls, Idaho. The 39-year-old teacher of Web site development at a technical college has been on eBay since 1998. He says he sells $2,000 a month of merchandise, mostly home furnishings. “Everyone thinks that people can sell junk on eBay and make lots of money,” Godfrey said. “It’s way more work than people let on,” he said between checking on inquiries. “That’s the problem,” he says. “You are on call all the time.”
Business, World, Xaprio Solutions June 19th, 2006Navigating government bureaucracy is not easy, but it may become faster with Google Inc.’s new search site for U.S. federal, state and local government.Google U.S. Government Search, http://usgov.google.com, was launched on Thursday by the search leader.
Google said the site should make finding U.S. government information easier for government employees and contractors. For example, a search of the word “highway” on the site returned links to the Federal Highway Administration and the California Highway Patrol.
Another for “Iraq” returned links to Library of Congress documents and The World Factbook, a collection of country profiles published annually by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The site can be personalized and also offers news from the White House, the armed forces and even provides a weather report for Washington, D.C.
It is the latest in a series of specialized content sites developed by Google, which launched a search engine devoted to Shakespeare on Wednesday.
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