Can we "force" a search word? (continued)
Summary: eburtonlab is looking for a chrome headlight bezel for a 1960 Ford pickup truck and shares their frustration with ineffective search results cluttered with irrelevant items. They describe their strategy for refining searches by using specific keywords, excluding unrelated terms, and filtering categories. They also provide several eBay search links as examples to help find the desired part more effectively.
@swapij writes in a now-closed thread:
I need a chrome headlight bezel for a 1960 Ford pick up. That's it. That's all I want. Showing me a gear shift knob for a 1954 Mercedes is not going to get me to buy it. My email has been cluttered with junk I am NEVER going to buy. I have put quotation marks around every single word - it only helps a little, I still get all the other garbage.
Ironically, it's also not showing me the part that I actually want.
My general strategy for searching is to pick useful keywords that sellers are likely to use in their titles, group the keywords together that you expect to be in order using a dash, exclude keywords if necessary, then search. From the results, narrow to a particular category, then use category-specific filters if necessary. If that does not produce enough results, or if there are too many unrelated results, refine the search and try again.
The keyword grouping technique helps to avoid listings of the unscrupulous sellers that stuff their item-specifics with unrelated spam keywords so that their listings show up in the maximum number of searches. Sometimes excluding a random make, model or year that is unrelated to your item of interest can help with those.
For headlight bezels, there are some in the Lights subcategory of automotive accessories, and also some in the Exterior Parts subcategory, so using a slightly broader category is probably the best way to find all of them, at the cost of a few not entirely related results being shown.
Try searches like these as starting points:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/6030/i.html?_nkw=bezel+headlight+1960-Ford+truck&LH_TitleDesc=0&_sop=10
There may be some good results among the "matching fewer words" section of the results as well.
Here is a search using an excluded year to eliminate some unwanted results:
