Booleas seach ("-" for not) does not work

[eten33]

Booleas seach ("-" for not) does not work.  I searched for "north face goretex jacket green" in men's 'Coats, Jackets & Vests', marked: small, regular, and green, and got 26 results.  Then, I added '-fleece" to the search and got only 3 results despite there was only 1 fleece jacket and there should be 25 results.  The same is with any other exclusion and in other searches.  Why eBay has such problems when it is so easy to program Boolean operations?

--Gene

[eburtonlab · Accepted solution]

Using a search command such as an exclusion has more than one effect.

Aside from removing all the fleece results, the exclusion also prevents keyword substitution from being automatically applied. That means you also lose all the possible matches that only contain the term Gore-Tex rather than Goretex.

Try this search instead:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=north+face+%28gore.tex%2Cgoretex%29+jacket++-fleece&_...

Exclusions, quotes around individual keywords or groups of keywords, or using parentheses to search multiple Boolean "OR" keywords bypass the automatic search expansion features of keyword substitution or automatic keyword-to-category navigation.

eBay currently does not do a good job of documenting this particular aspect of search, though you can still find traces of it in old Help pages on other sites, such as here on eBay Ireland:

https://www.ebay.ie/pages/help/search/search-commands.html

[eten33]

I should have searched for "north face (goretex, gore-tex, gore tex) jacket green" including different spellings of "Gore-tex".

[eburtonlab]

eBay's search treats most punctuation marks used within search terms as identical to each other (or equivalent to a single space), so the search term gore-tex should also match titles containing gore tex, gore.tex, gore_tex and gore*tex.

[eten33]

Thanks.

--Gene

[eburtonlab]

You are very welcome. Good luck with your searches!