Getting More From Saved Searches

As someone who is a big fan of EBAY I will confess that for a person who is targeting their searches towards comics it is not nearly as user friendly as other sites like Comic Connect, Comic Link or Heritage but it is possible to fake it and make your life much easier.

Let's say you have a list of Silver Age Superman comics you want and you don't want anything graded less than 8.0 (VF). You could do a search like this, "Superman VF #168" in order to get Superman issue 168 in Very Fine condition and then you have to sift through the results. The problem is you get issues of Superman Family and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen and Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and on and on. And you also need more searches for Near Mint and a search for 8.0. If you save your searches and have them produce emails you'll be getting a flood.

Here is a stored search I currently use....

Superman (vf,nm,8.0,8.5,9.0,"very fine") (122,127,133,134,137,143,154,164,168,171,174,176,178,180,182,198) -olsen -finest -lane -superboy -family -pal -FN -F/

What this search does is get any Superman comic for these 16 issues. The list of grade types will match on any within the brackets. I minus out any with olsen, finest, lane etc. as well as grade FN and F/. This does a very good job of focusing my search and allowing me to get just one email. There is other fine tuning I can do and with free form text some comics will always slip though the gaps. For instance if someone misspells Superman but for searching on EBAY it makes my life much easier.

For World's Finest Comics I had to start my search with ("world's finest", "worlds finest") to capture with and without an apostrophe. It's actually kind of fun putting together a search to really drill down.

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