Misspelled brand name searches are best
There’s a page on Missing-Auctions.com that allows you to see the last ten misspelled eBay searches that users have done. If you take a look at the page you’ll see that some searches are going to be far more successful than others.
For example, a user searching for ‘motorola cell phone‘ won’t get as many results as a users searching for just the brand name ‘motorola‘. This is because the first result is quite specific and relies upon the person selling the item to have included the words ‘mobile phone’ in the title of the item that they are selling. A search for ‘motorola phone‘ would certainly yield more results but, amazingly, not everyone who sells a mobile phone actually includes the words ‘phone‘ in the auction title.
So by going just for the brand name you’ll get more results but, and it’s a big but, this can lead to lots of results that you’ll need to wade through.
A way around this is to narrow your search by category. The default is to search all categories but since we’re interested in a mobile phone, we ought to select the ‘Mobile and home phones’ (on eBay.co.uk) or ‘Cell phones and PDA’s’ category (on eBay.com). To further narrow down your search you could put words to ignore into the exclude box. If you want to exclude more than one word, simply seperate them by commas.
If you follow these tips, you’ll strike a balance between finding lots of misspelled items and finding the ones that you want to find.
Happy hunting !