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How To Search
How To Search
Assume that you are a baseball fan and you want to search for a St Louis Cardinals baseball cap. (The "St Louis Cardinals" are an American baseball team.) Your first try at a query might be:
This instructs eBay to return all items with all five of the keywords
Notice that because you have
By putting
In order to fashion an ideal search string,
it is important to consider whether there are any common synonymns (words with identical or similar meanings) for each keyword in the search string.
In our search string,
This new search string returns 460 results, which is much better than the previous search string!
Finally, examine the actual search results returned by eBay.
Quickly browsing through the 460 items,
we find that there are caps from a
The minus sign tells eBay that what follows (either a single word or a parenthetical group of words) is to be excluded from the results if it appears in the title. The new search string returned 32 fewer results than our previous search because all the Arizona Cardinals caps and all the winter beanies were excluded. The number of results returned for each search are only examples. You will most likely get a different number of results if you run the same searches. Other Basic Search Rules: DO Use categories to limit your search to specific types of items. This will often make your search string simpler. DO NOT Use non-descriptive words like "A" "The" "And" "Where" "With" "For" and so on. If these words do not appear in the title of an item, the item may not be returned in your search results. DO Use the Test Query button to test several different strings for each query and examine the actual results that eBay returns. Then use the eBay results to help fine-tune your query.
![]() Left-Handed Smoke Shifter Operator wearing Cardinals Cap circa 1908
Odd.com is not affiliated with nor endorsed by eBay Inc.
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