76 million times each day, members use eBay's search box when
they're looking for items that are of interest to them.
It occurred to me that very few of these members would know how
eBay's search worked. Put another way, knowing how eBay's search
system operates might help you in finding bargains.
For a start, words keyed into the standard search box are only
matched against auction titles, and not against the contents of
auction descriptions.
eBay's searching defaults to an "all present" style of search.
This means if you key in two words such as 'finding nemo', the
search will return auctions where the title contains both words
in any order. It won't bring back auctions if the auction title
contains only one of the words.
If you want to do a search of an "either or" style, you place
parentheses around the words and separate them with a comma and
no spaces. So, if you key in (finding,nemo) your search will
return auctions with either finding or nemo in the auction title.
Of course, with the finding nemo example, what you really want
to do is find auctions where finding nemo occurs as a phrase. To
do this, you place quotation marks before and after. So, if you
key in "finding nemo" your search will return auctions where the
titles contain the exact phrase finding nemo.
If you're not sure of the spelling of a particular word, or if
the word you want to search on is a preface with several
endings, you can use an asterisk as a "wild card". For example
if you're interested in a Vuitton handbag, some sellers misspell
vuitton or type it in incorrectly. You could search on vui*, and
this will bring back auctions with vuitton or vuiton in the
title, or indeed vui followed by any other combination of
letters.
These are probably the main search weapons you need to save you
time, and to help you home in on the items you want to find. If
you wish to explore eBay searching in even more depth, you will
find a very useful description of the process here:
http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/buy/search_commands.html
About the author:
Brian McGregor is an eBay and internet entrepreneur. He recently
created the 'eBay Master Class' for eBay sellers. For your free
copy, please go to
http://www.work
winners.com/ebm-request.htm
