Ebay Hidden Feature. Awesome.

I just wanted to get a job of thermometers on ebay. I did a search for "thermometer" and got 1336 hits. I thought that that was way too many to browse... my search must be refined.

Ebay has many advanced search commands that can be used to redefine your search:

• Adding a minus sign, eg. "-egg", means "dont show any items that contain "egg".
• Adding qutotaion "marks around a phrase" means find exactly that phrse.
  
• You want to find words that start with a certain sequence of letters use an asterix, eg chin* bud*

That is all fine, but it didn't help me. I wanted not one thermomenter but many. I wasnt prepared to go through 1336 entries looking for lots with more than one thermometer. There had to be a way.

I did some reaseacrh and I found the answer. I am not going to say how but It involved no industrial espoinage or system hacking. This is a feature not documented or mentioned anywhere. Not on Ebay nor in the rest of the world wide web. A feature not mentioned on usenet, newgroups, the blogosphere, irc, msn, aol, compuserve, icq, icq, secondlife, cnn,bbc, msnbc, email or the radio.

This is its first documentation.

The ebay command to signify that you wish to search for more than one item of any given item is to append the term with the "s" character. For examples.

It is that simple.

Using the "s" command I reduced the "thermometer" search from 1336 to just 18. Awesome.