Quick Tip: Finding items on ebay…
Just a quick tip today…
eBay is a great source for most anything… especially for computer releated items. For example, we’re often looking for a particular RAID controller, type of ECC memory, or other part that you won’t find down at your local computer shop. BUT eBay’s search function leaves something to be desired, at least until you start learning some of the nuances.
For example, we’re always on the lookout for deals for certain series of Xeon processors we use. For example one of the servers will use several of the X3000 series quad cores. eBay has a nice feature that you can save searches and it will email you the results daily. But the search itself takes some practice. In our example we’re looking for a Xeon X3210, 3320, 3350 or 3360 processor. But if you type “xeon x3210 x3320 x3350 x3360″ into the search box, ebay will politely tell you “Your search returned 0 items.” But we know ebay has some of these on there, so how can that be. It’s the Boolean logic that eBay uses. It is searching for an item that has ALL of those terms in it, and there aren’t any. What we really want is “xeon” AND ( “X3210″ OR “X3320″ OR “X3350″ OR “X3360″) and may want to narrow down which categories we search under, but we’d be pretty close to right on with just that alone. So how do we tell ebay to use “or” logic? We put a “,” between them, but we also need to separate them out from the term “xeon” we do that with parentheses. The resulting search string becomes “xeon (x3210, x3320, x3350, x3360)” which as I write this results in 15 auction and 37 store items, of which all but a dozen of which are what we’re looking for. The others happen to be IBM X3350 servers which use xeon processors (but not the xeons we are looking for).
To get eBay to email you, use the “save this search” feature near the top. Sign in if needed, and tell it how often and logn to email you.
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Robert Porter holds Oracle Certified Professional-Java 6, MCSE, A+, Net+, Project+, Security+, and multiple CIW certifications. He has been in the hosting industry for more than a decade and is founder of Lagniappe Internet L.L.C., a privately owned, completely debt free, hosting company based out of New Orleans. Robert's background includes 25+ years in programming, databases, networking and systems administration. |
