I would be interested to know what CT members think of the pros and cons of these two primary auction history database sites. I subscribe to ACSearch, primarily because of its substantially lower subscription price. Most of the time it meets my needs but ACSearch does not catalog a lot of major auction houses, even some recent major sales. I was also a bit disturbed after my first subscription that they advertised pre 2000 auctions but most of these are early 20th century historical listings without prices - Interesting content for limited provenance research, but I've never found this useful. Would much rather see an expanding database previous to 2000. I've also had a number of conversations with dealers from major auction houses who who cited CoinArchives as a source for the value of a coin I was thinking of selling. Is CoinArchives a better database/worth the money, for auction history?
ACSearch is certainly better suited to my needs, given that the annual subscription price is a small fraction of that of Coin Archives. And I don't use it expecting to find pre-2000 provenances anyway.
As a younger collector I don't have the money for both. That being said, I find that acsearch is a much more useful tool when I'm researching coins and comparing prices and grades. Yeah the hassle to dig up the past auction listings is kinda annoying but it is worth it.
I think https://www.sixbid-coin-archive.com/ should be considered as a credible third option, and it's free.
CNG and CBG go back to 2011. I use this site when I have an auction # and lot #. I use acsearch and deamoneta's archives over Coin Archives due to price. Most of what I do is compare pictures and weights of a coin I might buy to similar coins.
While I still use AC Search and Coin Archives, I often find myself using this one(SIXBID Archive) as my 1st go-to(as a better overall free tool than the other two). I find CNG's(Research Sold Items) also helpful.
Thanks for your feedback everyone. It sounds like there are few champions for CoinArchives subscriptions.
I don't subscribe to either. At the free level ACSearch is obviously better since it goes back much further. If you want prices of anything relatively recent (maybe < 10 years - depends on auction site) you've found on ACSearch, you can look it up on SixBid's completed auctions (not SixBid Archives) since that allows you to find specific auctions and look up lot numbers.
Personally I swear by acsearch premium. It's been immensely useful for me in a range of ways, especially in terms of finding provenance (though none that are terribly old, but 10-15+ years of recorded, verifiable sales history these days is always nice to have) and determining market value and my own max when bidding. While I would concede CoinArchives likely does have more functionality, I personally just can't justify the added price. The difference in cost is equivalent to a nice coin, and acsearch retains about 90% of the functionality of CoinArchives at ~15% of the cost. However I would like to see them add more pre-2000 catalogues, especially in the 1970-1999 range as these seem to be the provenances that are hardest to rediscover these days given the relative recency and massive abundance of sales coupled with a lack of ditigization for sales from this period. I feel that many of the more important and older pre-1950 catalogues can be accessed digitally more easily these days so those are a lower priority, though having these would of course also be nice.
This is the way I used to operate. Find it on ACSearch, then go to CNG, Sixbid or other sites to find the hammer price. I finally subscribed to ACSearch for the convenience, especially the ability to sort by hammer price. Sorting by hammer price allows me to zero in on closely equivalent coins to determine their approximate value (although this technique has become increasingly unreliable over the last two years). I see Sixbid archives also allows sorting by hammer price but ACSearch has a lot more content between 2000 and 2011.
My thoughts exactly. ACSearch (or any other database) would be significantly more valuable if they started expanding their database with older listings 1970-1999. In the years I've been a subscriber, I have seen none of this expansion.
I think their usefulness really depends on how specialized you are and the rarity of the coins you're after. It also depends on whether you're trying to provenance a coin, or whether you just want to know how much you should bid. In full fairness, I subscribe to neither service but use both. CoinArchives provides prices for the last year or so (for free). When I'm looking at a relatively common coin, this is huge because it gives me an idea what the prices are now. Having lengthy history doesn't really help then, since I need to know the current conditions. For rarer coins, I use acsearch since (the free version) goes back farther. Usually I'm just trying to understand how rare the coin is and the range of conditions. If I want to know the auction price, I just go to that auction's site and they usually have archives. As already mentioned, CNG's research and Roma's search are also very helpful. I imagine that for those looking to spend good money on a coin and therefore want a very good idea of every known copy that's come up for auction, subscribing is worth it.
I have found that if I just enter a coin description on Google search, both the AC and Coin Archives often come up, often with prices. Sometimes I have found AC Research results which I had not found when I tried AC Research direct. The AC Research search engine seems very inflexible and if your description does not closely match theirs, they will not find it. On the other hand, the Coin Archives search engine is too flexible; you receive results on many coins which are irrelevant but happen to share a key word with your description. SixBids is useful and free but does not go back so far.
Have you tried using their search codes? For example: (antoninianus aurelianus) --> searches for "antoninianus" OR "aurelianus" -commentaires --> excludes records with the word "commentaires" (I find this useful for excluding cgb results, which include a lot of text that sometimes produces false positives.) sester* --> finds anything with a word beginning with "sester" e.g. sestertius, sesterz (although in this case their built in thesaurus probably already takes care of it) These codes can be used in combination as well, e.g.: -(gordian balbin*) I find acsearch to be very good value for the money. I had a free trial of CoinArchives for a while, but didn't find worth the large premium.
What I honestly can't understand is why neither acsearch nor coinarchives normalize the results. If I search for "Poliorcetes" vs "Poliorketes", it should return the same thing. "Coenus" vs "Koinos" should also return the same thing. This is pretty basic database normalization. One can easily train an AI model to differentiate Roman vs Greek names, then run the Greek names through a letter normalization process. Search terms are normalized the same way.
I find myself on ACsearch several times per week, and every time I need to do price research. I also refer to the CNG archives quite a bit .. Between the 2 resources I’ve found everything I’ve ever needed with the exception of old, lost provenances
In my experience there is some normalization. I assume this is through their Thesaurus option that is under the options menu. For example much of my research is on Roman Republican coins and I routinely use the acronym "RRC" instead of spelling out "Crawford". Even though RRC is almost never used in favor of Crawford, the search engine seems to return the same results (RRC 44/5 or Crawford 44/5) Thanks for this pointer. I was unaware of these search codes. I just found them under the "How To" menu under the top detail menu icon .