eBay Hacks, 2nd Edition

Control Fuzzy Searches

Choose when and how plurals and variations of your search terms are used in searches.

For the most part, eBay searches return only listings that match your search terms exactly. That is, if you search for possum, you won’t necessarily retrieve the same results that you would in a search for opossum.

Historically, to perform a fuzzy search, you’d have to include all the variations of a word in the search box manually, like this:

    (opossum,possum,apossoun)

To accommodate singular and plural variants of a word, you’d have to type something like this:

    (antenna,antennas,antennae)

The OR search commanded by the use of parentheses [Hack #10] takes care of this nicely. But it’s not always necessary.

All eBay searches automatically include common plurals and a few alternate spellings of words. For instance, a search for antenna will also yield results matching antennas rendering the use of an OR search or wildcards redundant in this case. The same is true for lens and lenses, as well as watch and watches. (The equivalency of plurals doesn’t necessarily carry over to phrase searches. See “Use Keywords Effectively” [Hack #47] for an example.)

Plurals aren’t the only variations included in fuzzy searches; search for spiderman and you’ll also get listings that match spider-man. Likewise, t-shirt and tshirt are considered equivalent, as are Mr. T and Mr T.

Unfortunately, eBay’s support for fuzzy searches is a little unreliable and difficult to predict; sometimes the results ...