eBay Hacks

Controlling 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)

or, to accommodate singular and plural variants, you’d have to type something like this:

(antenna,antennas,antennae)

The OR search commanded by the use of parentheses, as described in [Hack #9], takes care of this nicely. But it’s not always necessary.

As part of eBay’s new search engine (code-named “Voyager” and introduced in 2003), all eBay searches automatically include common plurals and known alternate misspellings of words. For instance, a search for “tire” will also yield results matching “tyre” as well as “tires” and “tyres,” rendering the messy OR search unnecessary in this case.

Of course, the inclusion of these variations isn’t always desirable. For instance, if you’re looking for rooftop antennas for a Pennsylvania Railroad PA-1 locomotive, you wouldn’t so much be interested in a book discussing the antennae of Pennsylvania cockroaches. To force eBay to search only for exact matches of words, enclose such terms in quotation marks, like this:

pennylvania "antennas"

which is practically equivalent ...