Some Advanced Search Tips

Search_tips

We’ve seen a few tickets requesting ways to filter search results.  Instead of making the search form more complicated by adding more fields we’ve enabled some advanced search features.  If you’re brave and want to use some of these feel free to give it a shot and let us know what you think.

“cat dog” means “cat AND dog” - This is the default mode and it will return auctions with both “cat” AND “dog”.

“cat | dog” means “cat OR dog” – This will return auctions with the words “cat” or “dog” in them.  That isn’t a capital “i” or a “one” … it should be the vertical bar on the same key as “”.

“reward !coke” or “reward -coke” means “reward AND NOT coke” – This is probably going to be the most useful for you guys based off the suggestions we’ve gotten.  This will return auctions with the word “reward” but will exclude auctions with the word “coke”.  When you use the “!” or “-” symbol you must have another search term (choosing a category doesn’t count).  This means searching for “!coke” is invalid.

“(cat dog) | bird” means “(cat AND dog) OR bird” – Parenthesis can be used to make complex queries.  The example given will return auctions with the words “cat” and “dog” or just the word “bird”.  Now for something a bit different, if you did “cat dog | bird” you might think it would be the same thing, but it actually translates to “cat and (dog or bird)”.  The OR actually has higher precedence than AND.

Confused yet?  Have fun!

Comments

  1. MattChance says:

    Thank goodness for the -*keyword* trick. There’s good reason for this to be on every site with a search engine. I have gotten frustrated lately with Coke Rewards showing up in every Listia search result, so this will definitely nip that in the bud (I don’t mind Coke Rewards, but don’t need to see them that often)!Very happy.

  2. MattChance says:

    I do wish you could use it with sub category searches though. For example, to search for all items in the “Gift Cards” subcategory, while still excluding “Coke” from the results completely. I didn’t know that it didn’t cover that type of query.

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