Something wrong with search or are boolean searches blocked?

[kaster]

Tried searching eBay Motors, Air Intake & Fuel Delivery, Intake Manifold and results don't match expectations.

If I search chevrolet 454 I get 221 results.

If I search chevrolet bbc I get 429 results.

If I search chevrolet (bbc,454) I get 44 results.

Seems like the boolean logic is being ignored by search and I'm only getting results with both BBC and 454.

I use Chrome but got the same results in IE. Did things change or is this my glitch of the day?

[eburtonlab · Accepted solution]

@kaster 

In most cases, using advanced search operators (exclusions, quotes or parenthetical expressions) has the side effect of disabling eBay's Search Expansion features -- which includes keyword substitution and implicit category navigation.

So your first two searches will include matches for keyword substitutes like chevy, while your last search will not. That is why the last search returns many fewer results.

Unfortunately the current help pages do not explain the way that search actually works. For more details, see this old help page from eBay Ireland:

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

For more complete results, try this search instead:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=%28chevrolet%2Cchevy%29+%28454%2Cbbc%2Cbig.block%29&_...

[kaster]

Thanks for the information. It does explain some of the odd search results I get.

It's always a challenge trying to come up with an effective search without being able to use wildcards.

[eburtonlab]

@kaster 

You are most welcome.

I miss the wildcard searches as well; when they stopped working, I had many, many bookmarked searches that suddenly stopped returning results, and it took me quite a while to recreate those searches using the new syntax and kludgy workarounds.