Elias Saba’s Blog

My sister called to tell me the LCD screen on her digital camera was cracked. I told her not to worry since the camera was pretty old already, but that I would check to see how much a replacement screen would cost. I first checked my favorite “cheap stuff from china” site, DealExtreme.com, but unfortunately they didn’t carry the screen for he exact model, a Canon SD300.

The next cheapest place to find the right part would undoubtedly be eBay. I loaded eBay’s homepage and searched for sd300 screen (All eBay search queries will be green in this article). That resulted in 9 matches. I’m sure some people would be content with these 9 result, but you and I know better. There must be more than 9 auctions for the item I want. Here is how to find them efficiently.

Searching eBay for sd300 screen resulted in 9 matches. The next thing most people would do is modify their search query. How about the word “lcd”? Some sellers might use the word “lcd” instead of “screen”, right? The worst thing you could do is to just add “lcd” to the query and search for sd300 lcd screen. This resulted in 7 matches. This new query is worse because eBay uses an AND operator by default. This means that searching for sd300 lcd screen will bring up auctions with the word sd300 AND lcd AND screen. All three words must be in the auction title to be a match. You didn’t want to narrow down your search, you wanted to broaden it.

Most people understand that eBay’s search works this way; the more words you add to a query, the fewer matches you will get. So instead of adding “lcd” to the original search, you should replace “screen” with “lcd”, right?  Wrong.  Searching for sd300 lcd returns 13 matches. While we did find more auctions, most of them are duplicates from our previous search for sd300 screen (because they include both “screen” and “lcd” in the title) and even worse, we actually lost all auctions that have the word “screen” but don’t have the word “lcd”.

Our goal here is efficiency. You could of course search for sd300 screen and peruse the results, then search for sd300 lcd and peruse the results, then tweak the query a little more and see what comes up, and continue this pattern until you have scowerd every inch of eBay for the item you’re looking for. The problem is with each new query you will be wasting time skimming through auctions you’ve already seen in previous queries. The solution to this is eBay’s OR operator.

If you place words inside a set of parenthesis and separate them by commas, eBay will apply an OR operator to those words instead of the default AND operator. The easiest way to further explain this is through examples. If we search eBay for sd300 (screen,lcd) it is the equivalent of combining the results for sd300 screen with the results for sd300 lcd and removing all duplicate auctions. In other words, you are telling eBay to give you all auctions that contain the word “sd300″ AND either the word “screen” OR “lcd”. Searching eBay for sd300 (screen,lcd) returns 15 matches. We now have all 13 auctions from the sd300 lcd search, plus the two we lost when we removed “screen” in one efficient list.

Are we done? Of course not! eBay is huge! 15 results is pathetic! There should be more! Strike that, there MUST be more! More! MORE!

While searching for sd300 (screen,lcd) we see many auctions include “sd200″ and “sd400″. This probably means all three camera models use the same screen. A quick bit of research proves this to be true and so our new eBay search is for (sd200,sd300,sd400) (screen,lcd) with a result of 17 matches. This means there were two auctions for “sd200″ or “sd400″ screens which didn’t have the word “sd300″ in the title. If we searched for sd200 (screen,lcd) then for sd300 (screen,lcd) and then for sd400 (screen,lcd) separately, we would have had to sift through 3 different lists with 40 items total just to see 17 unique auctions. Are you starting to see how powerful the OR operator is? No? Then read on.

Analyzing the results of our search further we notice many include “IXUS” in the title. A quick Google search reveals the Canon SD line is called the Canon IXUS line outside of the US and that the sd200/sd300/sd400 are the same as the ixus30/ixus40/ixus50. Since they all use the same LCD screen, we might as well include that in our serach. Now our search is for (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50) (screen,lcd) and returns 20 matches. But we’re not done yet. We need to account for sellers who chose to use “ixus 30″ in their title instead of “ixus30″. The last search does not inlcude auctions with a space between the letters and numbers in the camera’s model characters. The all inclusive search query becomes (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50,”sd 200″,”sd 300″,”sd 400″,”ixus 30″,”ixus 40″,”ixus 50″) (screen,lcd) and ads 3 more auctions for a total of 23 matches.

We have greatly improved from our initial 9 results from searching for sd300 screen. We could stop here and be happy with our selection of matching auctions, but there’s one more group of candidates not included in our search result yet. Skimming the current results I noticed one auction for a broken sd400 camera. It found its way into our search because the seller specified in the auction title that the “LCD works”. Since the price of a broken camera with working screen isn’t much more than a screen alone, it makes sense to include auctions for broken cameras matching our list of compatible models. We could create a separate query just for this group, but there really is now need when we can easily add key words like “broken”, “repair”, and “parts” to our current query. This brings our final search query to (sd200,sd300,sd400,ixus30,ixus40,ixus50,”sd 200″,”sd 300″,”sd 400″,”ixus 30″,”ixus 40″,”ixus 50″) (screen,lcd,broken,repair,parts) which gives us a grand total of 61 auctions potentially selling the item we want to purchase. With all auctions on one list we can sort the results and easily compare our options.

To put our new search query into perspective, it is the equivalent of searching for all of the following and removing the duplicate auctions: