Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

How can I add an eBay search box that searches titles and descriptions?

Dave, I got the search box into my site (as detailed here: Add an eBay search box to your Web site) but I need to be able to use it to search both title and description. I have not had any luck getting that part in. I need this because I encode the description of an eBay listing with a specific number giving my customers an easy way to look at their items only. Thanks for the help

Dave's Answer:

The default eBay search is pretty easy to emulate because, well, it's simple. Being able to duplicate the more sophisticated functionality of its advanced search is a bit more tricky, because we need to crack open the HTML itself and see what's inside.

The default search is certainly attractive enough:

Crack open the HTML code, however, and the form is insanely complicated, so complicated that I couldn't really make head nor tail of it without stripping away some of the core functionality. Nonetheless, assume you always want to check all categories and the basic search form can be reduced to:

here's the cool thing, though. Search through the source code for "Search title" and you'll find that there's a single checkbox value that makes that option work:

<input type="checkbox" name="fts" value="2" />Search title <b>and</b> description<br />

My question, therefore, is what happens if I just make this checkbox available in the simple form shown earlier? Just literally copy and paste that single line of HTML. Here's the result:

A bit of testing will reveal that it works perfectly! If you want to just hide the setting, turn the checkbox into a hidden variable, paying attention to the default value that the eBay server wants to receive (detailed in the original HTML):

Further experimentation shows that some of the variables being sent are unnecessary! In fact you can do just fine with the following code, added line for the checkbox highlighted in bold:

<form method="get" action="http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll">
<input type="text" name="satitle" value="" maxlength="300" size="30" />
<input type="checkbox" name="fts" value="2" /> search titles and descriptions<input type="submit" value="Search" tabindex="3">
</form>

Or, if you want the minimal search box and know that every time someone wants to search, they really want both title and description:

Hope that helps you customize your page!

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Categorized: Auctions and Online Shopping , CGI Scripts and Web Site Programming (Article 7688)
Tagged: cgi, ebay, html, html forms
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Comments

I'd add this box into my site and it's working just fine

Posted by: Pradeep Kumar at February 23, 2008 4:15 AM

Hi Dave,

I must say, I love your work!

I wanted to implement a similar thing on my eBay store site, but I'd rather have a neat little box in a position of my choice, instead of using the ugly default eBay side menu.

Is there a way to customise the search form so it only searches within my eBay store?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

Posted by: Graham Bae at October 7, 2008 9:06 AM

Graham, thanks for the kudos! You can indeed create an eBay merchant search box. See here:

http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_to_make_ebay_store_merchant_search_box.html

See especially the follow-on comments too!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at January 3, 2009 7:46 AM

Hello
How can I add a search box to my ebay store pages that will allow the search to work only for the page that it is started on ? In other words when someone finally gets to a page called The Dark Room which only has vintage photos on it I want the search to bring up items only on that page.

Thanks

Posted by: Marisa at February 17, 2009 8:00 AM

Dave,

As always a great post. I do have a question for you though. Is there anyway to insert our ebay campaign id from epn into the code?

Posted by: Harland at March 22, 2009 6:15 AM

Harland, I'm afraid I don't really know what you're talking about with eBay Campaign ID and EPN. Can you point me to a page that has a search engine that does what you want?

Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 23, 2009 6:04 PM

Hi Dave, this is fantastic stuff!

I would like to know if it is possible to add a hidden word to the search so that when a user clicks the search button, this word is added to what the user put in?

Hope that makes sense!

Thanks very much in advance.

Posted by: Jody at April 6, 2009 12:55 PM

Might you point me to someone to code a script to search eBay completed listings using specific criteria, and export the results to XLS?

iMacros hang up repeatedly.

Thnx.

Ian

Posted by: Ian at July 14, 2009 1:04 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!