[ARC5] Question about finding our treasures on eBay...

[john rose]

Ken, you are correct. The instant you use a 'switch' in the search, it becomes very snottily specific. All advanced options are nullified. Been that way for years. The search terms would be;

(capacitor,Capacitor,condensor,capaciter,capacitors,condensors,capaciter) -(ceramic,ceramics,Ceramic,Ceramics)

Some don't get the spelllink right.
One fast way to reduce clutter is to look on the left hand side of the results page and note what categories come up. If they are predominately in one category switch to that one, and save the search. Next time just click on the saved search. For my ARC 5 searches, I got tired of seeing welding rods, Batman comics with a 5 issue story arc, Joan of Arc, etc. Most of the results were in two categories, so I have two saved searches and follow the hints Greedbay digs up. For the Army versions, I have a search for SCR274 and another with the specific BC*** units in the title. In my searches for Bettie Page, for example, I grew tired of still getting 4,000+ results even with an exclusion string approaching the 150 character limit. 4 searches in specific areas of interest results in 1 to 50 results each. Biggest side benefit? Doing this for most of my searches reduced my search time more than 60%. I now don't know what to do with all the time on my hands. LOL

----------------------------------------
> From: kgordon2006 at frontier.com
> To: arc5 at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2013 16:24:09 -0700
> Subject: Re: [ARC5] Question about finding our treasures on eBay...
>
> On 8 Aug 2013 at 13:02, J. Forster wrote:
>
>> Why?
>>
>> My 2nd string is intended to return all capacitors, except ceramic.
>>
>> capacitor -ceramic is supposed to mean "capacitor AND NOT ceramic"
>>
>> It gets interpreted as something like "capacitors OR ceramic".
>>
>> The way the eBay strings should be parsed is:
>>
>> Word1 Word2 = Word1 AND Word2
>> Word1 -Word2 = Word1 AND NOT Word2
>> (Word1,Word2) = Word1 OR Word2
>
> Well, perhaps the problem is that Evil-bays search function views -ceramic
> and -ceramics as two different search criteria.
>
> In other words, it doesn't recognize "ceramic" as "polyCERAMICs" as any
> normal search engine should. Furthermore, it sometimes decides there is a
> difference between capitalized words and lower-case words...or letters.
>
> If you want to search for a plural word in an ad, you have to specify plural.
> Singular won't do it. And it won't recognize wild cards either.
>
> It is crap.
>
> Ken W7EKB
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