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Search eBay more effectively
Friday, December 29, 2006
If you use eBay regularly you may not be aware of how to increase the effectiveness of your searches. Here's a few tips below that may help:
1) Be specific
If you are looking for a particular item, put in more details e.g. if you want blue shoes type in 'blue shoes' rather than 'shoes'. If you are looking for a poster for your favourite band, type in 'bandname poster' rather than 'bandname'. Try also years or brands for specific results.
2) Search both titles and descriptions
The length of titles in eBay can be quite limiting - so if your search returns no results, try searching descriptions too.
3) eBay and Google search differently - use singular and plural versions
When searching in Google, your results will come back with both singular and plural variations. eBay doesn't do this so try both versions e.g. 'fish' and 'fishes'
4) eBay and Google search differently - and / or
Search engines do not use 'and' and 'or' literally - they allow you to use them to help target the results of your search e.g. 'fish and chips' will only find pages containing the words 'fish' and 'chips'. eBay on the other hand will only return results with exactly 'fish and chips' in the title / description.
5) Don't use punctuation unless it is standard
Again, eBay treats punctuation literally, so unless the item title or description uses it, you won't find any results e.g. if you want a t-shirt, search for 'tshirt', 't-shirt' and 't shirt'.
6) Searching for phrases
Typing in 'little fish' will find any results containing the words 'little' and 'fish'. Typing "little fish" (double quote marks) in the search box will find results containing words in that order only.
7) Removing a word from results
Typing in 'fish' may return results that also include sharks. What if you don't want sharks? Enter your search query as 'fish -sharks'
8) Removing multiple words from results
Typing in 'fish' may return results that also include sharks and whales. What if you don't want sharks and whales? Enter your search query as 'fish -sharks -whales'
9) Variations on words
From example 5 above, it would be time consuming to enter three different search terms, so instead enter (tshirt, t-shirt, t shirt) as your search term.
10) Wildcard searches
From example 3 above, it would be time consuming to enter different variations, so instead enter 'fis*' and any results containing 'fis' followed by anything else will be returned e.g. fish, fishing, fishes, fission etc...
11) Specific searches
If you know that you only want 'fish', type in "fish" (double quotes) to ensure that you only get results containing 'fish'. With some searches eBay automatically changes your search term to match more items. Searches using double quote marks will prevent this from happening.
Find eBay items in the UK or in the US.
Labels: ebay, searchengines
