LOL! ---> Search

[sakic92710]

I wanted to check sold items for CN Rail.  Interested to see how well Canadian National Railway items sell.  The first 5 listings?   A pair of pants, a Lego train kit, a pump, some kind of rod end joint & a pair of track pants.  What a failure of a business model.   LOL!  Am I still here?  Yes.  Will I continue to TRY & sell some things here?  Yes.  I NEED every possible resource to survive in this greedy 'pay this, pay that, pay up' world.

[eburtonlab]

CN Rail was what I put in the for a search.

If you search using CN Rail as your only search terms with no quotes or dashes, eBay will consider any listing with the keyword CN and the keyword Rail located anywhere in the title or the item-specifics to be a match. And eBay may expand the results to also show items with related keywords. So for instance, eBay may consider rail to be a synonym for track, and may provide some listings with cn and track in the title or item-specifics.

So that is why if you search for CN Rail you may wind up seeing things like track pants that happen to have a model number that starts with CN.

Most folks that encounter something like that when searching may simply skip over the track suit listings in the results, or add another keyword, or try typing out Canadian National Rail, or change the category to avoid clothing (unless they are actually searching for CN Rail logo clothing), or try grouping the keywords together with a dash or with quotes. Or find one result nearest to what they are searching for, and use the "more like this" or "view similar active listings" link.

The point is there is more than one way to search for something. Most folks intuitively understand this, even if they don't necessarily know all the possible tips and tricks that might work, they can probably come up with one or two things to try with a couple of moments of thought to allow them to get better results if they do not want to just skip over the unwanted results.

[eburtonlab]

I was looking up memory prices earlier today for a specific thing 32GB 4DRx4 2400T and there were more results that were not those numbers than were. Looked up the same thing about an hour later and there were only about 60 results that actually were the correct things.

Were you using the same search each time or did you change the search? If your first search was "Best Match" and the second was not, or if you changed your search in other ways, that might account for the difference. "Best Match" seems to show more results with a wider variance of relevance, particularly lately.

Searching for memory by keyword alone is hard because many sellers use nonstandard notation or sell memory in groups of smaller sizes that may add up to the amount you are searching for.

Using filters can help remove the lower capacity sets from your results:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/175698/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=32GB+4DRx4+2400T&Capacity%2520per%2520Module=3...