76 million times each day, members use eBays search box when theyre looking for items that are of interest to them.
It occurred to me that very few of these members would know how eBays search worked. Put another way, knowing how eBays 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.
eBays 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 wont 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 youre 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 youre 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
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
Site search is importantMost internet retailers underestimate the importance of good site search. Some retailers decide that it is so important that they dont even offer a way for searchers to look for products on their site. This is a short-sighted approach to retailing on the internet - statistics show that about 30% of all web purchases are the result of a site search so beefing up your search options can have a considerable impact on your bottom line.
There are many free scripts available onlineYou can find a lot of software solutions that are free or very inexpensive in order to provide site search. These scripts (typically ASP or PHP) usually work fine until a retailer offers about 100 different SKUs. Most of these free scripts either take a database approach where the site search crawls a database looking for a string match or a site-indexer that actually crawls each page on your site much like Google or another search engine would do.
Having more SKUs necessitates better searchIf you have more than 100 SKUs you will want a professional solution to maximize relevancy for your searchers. If a potential customer finds your site search inadequate they will most likely leave your site and look for a site with decent search functionality.
Google is the leader in searchThere is no question that Google is the leader in search technology - many small business such as internet retailers are dependent on Google and the other search engines to provide them with the traffic necessary to sustain their business. Google has mastered the process of indexing different pages and determining the relevancy of each page based on a user-defined search.
The Google Mini provides high-caliber search technology at a reasonable costThe Google Mini costs $3,000 which sounds steep to many retailers. Consider, however, the increased benefit of raising your conversion rate a tiny percentage - most retailers agree that the cost of the Mini is minimal considering the benefit. The Mini is a hardware and software solution that powers searches on your site. The rack-mountable server is easy to install and you can probably have it up and running within an hour out of the box. By taking the search load off of your existing server you are also likely to see an increase in productivity from your existing resources.
The Google Mini is scalableThe Google Mini can index 100,000 pages on your site without any decrease in performance. When you exceed this limit (meaning you have a site that is very large) you can upgrade to the Google Search Appliance for about $30,000 that will index over a million different pages.
Preston Wily is the Director of Marketing for , an online retailer of computer cables and accessories. He is also the writer of The Preston Blog, a .