Better Search Results (continued)

Sometimes you don't just want more results or more flexible results—you also want more specific results. Usually this means that some things came up in your search results that you don't want to see. When this happens, you can cause eBay to exclude those items by adding a related to your search with a hypen (-) in front of it. Consider the following exclusions:

• (teapot,cups,saucers) (dutch,china) -vintage
  Building on our previous example, this search returns all of the listings that are for a teapot, cups, or sauchers and that also include either the word "dutch" or the word "china," but it excludes any results that contain the word "vintage."
  
  
• (teapot,cups,saucers) (dutch,china) -vintage -antique -turquoise -jade -handmade
  This tool, too, can be used multiple times in a single search. This one is identical to the previous one except that it also excludes any listings for items that are "antique," made out of "turquoise" or "jade," or that are "handmade."

As you can see, by using parentheses and hypens, you can create fairly complex searches for eBay to carry out on your behalf—and you can save yourself a lot of time you'd otherwise spend filtering through results that you didn't want.

Searching Item Descriptions

Sometimes, when you want the absolute greatest number of results possible within your criteria, or when you're searching for an item that you think sellers may have listed in various ways, it can help to search not only for items' titles, but also for words in their descriptions.

Each time you run a search, you'll notice a checkbox just below the search box on your results page that's labeled "Search title and description." To run your search again, but search through the item descriptions (i.e. entire listings) rather than just through the titles of listed items, check this box and click the "Search" button again. You'll get a much longer list of results that still match the criteria you've already given.

Narrowing By Category

Once you have run a search, whether just by title or also by description, you can narrow your search results by eBay category using the list of related categories shown at the left edge of the results page. Simply click on any of the listed categories to re-run your search only for that category.

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