Odd responses to item searches

[affordableappliancesandparts]

Hi everyone.  I have been a eBay seller and buyer for over 5 years.  I use other buyer listing to help with pricing of my items.  I also use eBay to purchase items for my physical store.  I have noticed lately, maybe 10 -12 days that when I enter a part number in the search, I am getting a bunch of other random things mixed in with what I am looking for.   It use to be you had all the matching items at the top of the page, then a line about similar items underneath.   Is this an ebay issue or is a setting on mine messed up?  I would appreciate and feedback. 

[eburtonlab]

There are a couple of different things that might cause what you are seeing.

It may be that the "random" results you see also contain the same part number in the item-specifics. Not all part numbers are unique and several different items may share a part number. These can often be avoided by using additional keywords, or by limiting the category.

There may also be a keyword substitution issue. If eBay finds few or no results, eBay may try keyword variations that are similar that produce more results. This works well if a keyword is misspelled, but does not work well for things like part numbers. To avoid any keyword substitutions, put one of your keywords in quotes. That should force eBay to find only exact literal matches of all your search terms.

Best Match sort order seems to be more prone to keyword substitution problems. Trying a different sort order may work better in some cases.