How to exclude search terms consistently

[traew]

I'm currently trying to set up some saved searches to hunt for rare items, and the exclude function in eBay is refusing to work. I've tried modifying searches I've already put in by adding an exclude term, but it removes items that do not include the search term, or even synonyms of the word. Strangely all the results that are removed are always removed regardless of the search, even if the exclude term is a test term like "foobar" that is not in any of the listings. If I change the test term to one that excludes items that still show those get removed as well, but he mystery listings that shouldn't get removed all still go away as well.

Given that I'm using saved searches here I want to be able to exclude irrelevant results so I don't get bombarded with spurious notification emails but I also don't want a relevant listing to be excluded. Is there any way to make eBay actually do what it says and exclude listings containing the excluded terms without also excluding a completely random set of additional listings?

[disneyshopper]

In your search terms, are you using the    -  (minus/hyphen) in front of the search term you want ignored, such as

toy truck -Tyco -Caterpiller -Mattel

[traew]

Yes, to be clear, the search is removing the terms, it's just also removing a whole load of other listings that don't contain those terms.

[eburtonlab · Accepted solution]

@traew 

Using an exclusion term (or other Boolean expression such as quoted keywords or parenthetical-OR terms) in eBay's search has another effect besides just excluding that term. It also has the effect of disabling the "search expansion" feature which is responsible for a lot of keyword substitutions (both good and bad), and the keywords-to-item-specifics matching as well. It also disables the keyword-to-category substitution that can automatically change the category of your search.

eBay has removed many of the pages that describe how "search expansion" is supposed to work, but here are a couple of older pages; one from eBay Singapore has some references to no-longer-functional wildcard searches:

https://www.ebay.com.sg/pages/help/search/expanding.html

And here is a cached version of a Canadian eBay page that includes a reference to Boolean search expressions disabling "search expansion":

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MvI3EXmvxiIJ:https://www.ebay.ca/pages/help/se...

You may be able to undo some of the changes if you can figure out which substitutions matter in your search.

[traew]

Ahh, that explains it, thanks! Knowing what the missing search results have in common means I can probably safely ignore them tbh, I wasn't sure if it would miss relevant results before.

[eburtonlab]

@traew 

You are most welcome! Glad I could shed some light.

There are some cases where the keyword substitutions are very useful, such as when searching for a 1987 toyota -- search expansion will automatically find '87 toyota too.

To recreate that yourself, you would have to search (1987,87) toyota instead. Which is not too hard, if you know what substitutions to expect. Plurals tend to be a problem in many cases, as they are often overlooked.

But some of the substitutions are less obvious, and some are just plain wrong.