eBay's "search engine"

[meggy]

Ever notice Ebay's seach engine seems retrieve in a not quite right Boolean way since you can't actually use AND, OR, and NOT? Except it doesn't automatically use NEAR, which is probably a good thing.

ex: (shooting for Kenwood L-07D), typing in Kenwood L finds lots of Kenwood "LOOK"s, and even a Kenwood L-02A, but doesn't include L-07D, like Google might.

Typing in Kenwood L- doesn't get you any closer either.

It needs to be real specific. Even L-07 doesn't get you there. Only L-07D.

Get's even wierder when searching multiple words like reel-to-reel. At time of my search:

reel to reel (no hyphens) got 2478 returns.
reel-to-reel (with hyphens) gets 2310, 168 less units!

too many words: reel-to-reel recorder got only 278 returns. Missing quite a few actual units for sale that just didn't have the word recorder in the title. But it did, of course, eliminate all the tape only sales having only the word tape and not the word recorder in the title.

Bottom line is you have to be either real general, "Kenwood" and read through them all or real specific "Kenwood L-07D" and hope the title was set up that way.

Gotta really dig deep to include all possible listings of what you're after.

 

[Phil H]

There is no standard for search engines. Google is different than eBay and is different from AK. On eBay, the default is AND. For OR, the words must be enclosed in parenthesis with a comma dilimeter and no spaces ex (yamaha,kenwood). The minus sign is used for NOT. More information can be found in eBays help http://pages.ebay.com/help/find/search_commands.html

 

[Nat]

If Ohm loudspeakers are undervalued (which I'm not sure they are), its probably because searching them on Ebay is practically impossible. Every title includes 8 ohm or 4 ohm or whatever shows up, and there are a lot. You can't even use the specific categories on the side to exclude stuff, since most of the non Ohm ohm references are to speakers. I'm sure that smarter people than I have figured out how to get around this, but the minute you limit your market to the computer savy, you are less likely to get as high prices. A similar problem occurs with NEAR (New England Audio Resource), the descendent of Bozak -- you get a bazillion matches with 'near mint'.