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Hack 10 Controlling Fuzzy Searches

Choose when and how plurals and variations of
your search terms are used in searches.

For the most part, eBay searches return only listings that match your
search terms exactly. That is, if you search for
"possum," you
won't necessarily retrieve the same results that you
would in a search for "opossum."

Historically, to perform a fuzzy search,
you'd have to include all the variations of a word
in the search box manually, like this:

(opossum,possum,apossoun)

or, to accommodate singular and plural variants,
you'd have to type something like this:

(antenna,antennas,antennae)

The OR search commanded by the use of parentheses, as described in
[Hack #9], takes care of this nicely.
But it's not always necessary.

As part of eBay's new search engine (code-named
"Voyager" and introduced in 2003),
all eBay searches automatically include common plurals and known
alternate misspellings of words. For instance, a search for
"tire" will also yield results
matching "tyre" as well as
"tires" and
"tyres," rendering the messy OR
search unnecessary in this case.

Of course, the inclusion of these variations isn't
always desirable. For instance, if you're looking
for rooftop antennas for a Pennsylvania Railroad PA-1 locomotive, you
wouldn't so much be interested in a book discussing
the antennae of Pennsylvania cockroaches. To force eBay to search
only for exact matches of words, enclose such terms in quotation
marks, like this:

pennylvania "antennas"

which is practically equivalent to:

pennylvania antennas -antennae

Whether or not the quotes will be necessary, or whether
you'll still need to manually include variations
(using parentheses), will depend on the particular search
you're trying to perform. eBay's
fuzzy searches are based on a hand-selected dictionary of common
variations and plurals, meaning that
"tire" will match
"tyre," but it's
unlikely that eBay will go as far as to equate
"potato" with
"tater."

2.3.1 Punctuation

To simplify searches that would otherwise require very cumbersome
search phrases, nearly all forms of punctuation are considered
equivalent to spaces in eBay searches. For instance, say
you're looking for a 1:43-scale model car; you might
expect to have to type the following:

car (1/43,1\43,1:43)

Instead, all you would need to type is:

car 1/43

wherein the 1/43 keyword will match "1
43", 1:43, 1;43,
1\43, 1-43,
1.43, 1!43,
1@43, 1#43,
1$43, 1%43,
1^43, 1&43,
1_43, 1=43,
1+43, and 1~43.

Now, say that car is a 1968 Ford GT 40; the appropriate search phrase
would then be:

(gt40,gt-40) 1/43

While gt-40 is equivalent to "gt
40", it won't match
gt40 (without any space or punctuation), so the OR
search is still needed.

Unfortunately, punctuation doesn't fall under the
same rules as variations and plurals, meaning that the quotation
marks discussed above won't have any effect on
unwanted variations. Furthermore, the equivalence of punctuation also
means that the following will not work as expected:

"gt 40" -gt/40

See [Hack #9] for more information on
search exclusions.