Discussions

With spring cleaning season just around the corner, I figured now was as good a time as any to pick off one of the more important upgrades that I’ve been wanting to make to the classifieds.  
 
When you have a collection of more than 15,000 ads like we regularly have in the classifieds it’s super important that it be as easy as possible to locate the ads that you’re looking for as quickly as possible. We of course have all ads broken down by category and many people will browse a category of interest to find stuff that they might like. A few years ago as a project between myself and a few members we evolved things another step by adding a great and fairly unique “tag” system that essentially breaks categories into sub-categories and allows you another avenue to browse ads that might be relevant to what you’re trying to find.  
 
To compliment that popular tagging system and give everyone browsing the site one more tool in their toolbox, this afternoon I’ve rolled out much improved search functionality for classified ads to make it that much easier to drill down to items you’re looking for by using search boxes like the one at the top-right hand corner of any page in the site.  
 
Up until today, searches had to contain exact matches for ads. For example if you were looking for an iPad with a lot of storage you had to search for "64gb iPad” and hope that people posting ads for iPads used those words one after the other in that exact order. If someone had in stead described their item in the ad description as "iPad Air, practically new, 64gb in storage” the search would not find it. Even though it worked for many searches you could say that it was quite primitive because it required you as the user to do quite a few searches before finding the right match.  
 
With today’s update, using the above example your search results would include ads that contain either of the words “iPad" or “64gb" somewhere within the ad… using an internal ranking system to give higher priority to ads that have both words somewhere within them. Results determined to be of higher priority are by default shown at the top of the list and sorted.  
 
Beyond that, for advanced users there are a few new tools at your disposal. You can also include plus and minus signs before any words to tell the system that it must or must not include results with those words. For example:  
- to look for iPads that are either 32gb or 64gb you could search for “+ipad 64gb 32gb.” This would show you only ads that contain the word iPad and then amongst those ads give higher ranking in your search results for ads that contain either 64gb or 32gb.  
- if when doing that search you saw too many results for 16gb iPad versions you could update your search to make use of a minus sign before the word you’d like to exclude, “+ipad 64gb 32gb -16gb.”  
- you can also use the asterisk/star character at the end of a word as a wild card. For example searching for “skate*” would find all ads matching skate, skates, skateboard and skater.  
 
If this all doesn’t make 100% sense, the best thing to do is to dive in and make a few basic searches the next time you’re looking for something. Trying using a few different words, try changing your search further by category and tag and see how you’re able to narrow in on what you’re looking for. While no search engine is ever perfect, the end result is a lot more flexibility and a lot less work to search for what you’re looking for.  Or of course you can get at ads the same way you normally would by browsing categories or ads based on tags but this is one more important tool for many who are looking for something very specific.
 
For even more advanced users there are more options that can be added in the future, but we’ll start with these ones and will monitor how things go, tweak, etc before adding anything else. If all goes well I also expect to add the same flexibility to the iPhone app’s search in the next few days.  
 
If you ever have suggestions on how to improve the site, I’m always listening. The preferred method to get those suggestions is through the Contact & Support link at the bottom of the page since it would be easy for completely separate suggestions to take over a discussion that’s meant for a different topic. Thanks!

Thanks for asking.  
It does look like theres only one classical guitar on the site right now which is showing close to the top, 3 or 4 down the list when you do a search for "classical guitar."  As you go further down the list results will become less relevant. Since the system didnt find many ads that have *both* words in them you're starting to see ads further down the list that have *one* of those words. 
 
If you were wanting to be more specific in your search you could make use of the new plus-sign option. So if you search for "+classical guitar" it would force the system to only show ads that have the word "classical" in them and then within those results would give priority to ads that also include the word "guitar" (but not exclude an ad from the results just because it doesnt have that word). In that case a search comes up showing the ad for the Hagstrom at the top:  
 
For example:  
https://ebrandon.ca/classifiedsearch.aspx?startnum=1&q=%2Bclassical%20guitar&cat_id=0&sort=item_id%20DESC  
 
Or if you're completely sure that the only ads you'd want to see would have both of those words in it you could put a plus sign in front of both words. For example "+classical +guitar". In that case it turns up just the one ad you're mentioning:  
https://ebrandon.ca/classifiedsearch.aspx?q=%2Bclassical%20%2Bguitar&cat_id=0&minprice=&maxprice=&sort=15%20DESC&tags=