Boolean Searches?

[husbiewife]

I sometimes wish there were a way to search for phrases such as "solid-state," or two such, as in "Complex Series" / "Pro Series," (using all four words sans the slash [/] as criteria).

Anyone know?

[disneyshopper]

I know you can include a search term such as    "solid-state"    in your search and ebay will return listings that include "solid-state".  As for the other term, I don't think so.  I think you would have to perform a separate search for   "Complex Series"  and another seach for   "Pro Series"     .

[gosimus]

@husbiewife 

< I sometimes wish there were a way to search for phrases >    

For some reason I can't fathom, eBay seems to have removed this topic from the US site Help pages.  At least, I can't find it.  It's still on the Ireland site, for now anyway.   https://www.ebay.ie/pages/help/search/search-commands.html  

[rfmtm]

True Boolean searches have been gone for a long time, and just not on ebay.  Really frustrating for those of us that know exactly what they are looking for and know how to search for them.  Now ebay basically manipulates the search to the point you often do not see the the best deal or even the item you are actually looking for without a lot of other garbage showing up.

[eburtonlab]

By default, eBay will treat your keywords as a Boolean AND search -- so all the keywords must be present in the title or item specifics.

If you want to perform an OR search, to find either "complex series" OR "pro series", try this for your search terms:

 ("complex series","pro series")

You can combine the techniques to perform complex searches like "solid state" AND ("complex series" OR "pro series):

 "solid state" ("complex series","pro series")

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%22solid+state%22+%28%22complex+series%22%2C%22pro+se...

[gosimus]

@husbiewife 

Too late to edit my above, so I'm tacking this on.  The Help page that I linked to also explains that using any advanced operator also defeats Automatic Search Expansion.  ASE is a feature that returns search results of things you didn't search for, but they thought you should have. 

ASE annoys me so I try always to use at least one advanced operator in every search.  Most times I simply enclose one single word within quotation marks.  If you do this, be careful not to enclose two words within the same pair of quotation marks, unless you're consciously doing it to deliberately create a single character string of the two words. 

[gosimus · Accepted solution]

The above is from 2021.  In the interest of clarity, I'm posting now to explain that eBay has since edited the linked Help page.  The Ireland page, like the US page and the Singapore page before it, no longer contains the information that I described.  If you're scratching your head and saying to yourself "What the...?  This is no help." that's the reason.