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HOW to search title only?
using advanced search especially in ebay motors , if i search 4 key keywords , exact words any order i still get thousands of results. when there should only be a handful. even if i dont checkmark the 'search description ' box, the search populates description results also, because many of these sellers have a zillion keywords in the description
3 comments
greatlakesfordparts
OP6 months agothanks. workarounds, but not a real solution. experienced users should have the option while using advanced search to search titles only. Ebay used to have this function. I get they may get more potential sales by throwing all sorts of items out there based on inexperienced user search queries. but let the advanced people use the advanced function. I've been selling and buying on ebay since 1997.
eburtonlab
Mentor6 months agoIf you have a way to make eBay provide a title-only search, you should use it.
Otherwise, use a workaround.
A workaround that lets you find what you are looking for without having to wade through unwanted results is better than no workaround. The more you search, the more likely such a workaround is to save you time, even taking into consideration the extra time spent crafting your searches.
I doubt that keyword spammers get much benefit from all the spamming they do; no buyer is going to buy an unrelated item just because it comes up in a search -- unless the buyer makes a mistake. And once the mistake is discovered, the seller is very likely to get a "not as described" return and wind up paying for round trip shipping and refunding the buyer.
If eBay thought that buyers were likely to buy unrelated things just because those things appeared in a search, eBay could sprinkle unrelated items in search results without waiting for sellers to provide keyword spam. The fact that eBay does not do that leads me to conclude that eBay does not think that is an effective way to sell things.
eburtonlab
Mentor6 months ago@greatlakesfordparts
There is currently not a way to search title only; eBay considers keywords in item specifics to be potential matches for your search terms.
Automotive listings are notorious for being hard to search because some unscrupulous sellers insist on stuffing their item-specifics with lists of every conceivable keyword, whether the keyword is appropriate or not, so those listings appear in the maximum number of searches.
There are ways to avoid such listings, though.
One way is to narrow your search to a specific category, thus avoiding any listing outside that category. For instance, a user was recently having problems finding a radio for a Cutlass without turning up lots of unrelated results when searching generally, but narrowing to a specific category produced better results:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cutlass+radio&_sacat=171101&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=10
Not all sellers may list radios in that category, though, so if you want to find all the relevant listings, you may have to try some other techniques and put up with some unrelated items using similar keywords.
One technique is to group keywords together in order, and reject results that do not have those keywords in order, and thus avoid listings that have laundry lists of individual keywords:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cutlass-radio&_from=R40&_oac=1&_sop=10
This may not find some listings where your keywords are not in that exact order, though.
Another technique is to exclude a random, unrelated keyword from your search, thus avoiding all listings that contain the excluded keyword. The larger the laundry list of spam keywords a seller uses, the more likely the seller's listing are to be excluded. And since many of those spamming sellers are extremely lazy, they tend to copy the same keyword lists from each other.
An example search excluding a couple of keywords and combining other techniques:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=cutlass+radio+am-fm+-corvette+-fender&_sacat=0&_sop=10