When you search our product database, a standard search will look for the most accurate results based on the search word(s) you enter. If not all the words are found for one product, the closest matches will be shown using as many of your search words as possible. This does mean that the results can sometimes be confusing. For example if you used the search large blue widget, but no large blue widgets are in the database, the results may show you products using just two of the words you searched for - so it may show you seemingly irrelevant items like a large blue teapot.

If you have trouble finding what you want you can try improving the results by using boolean operators in your search - see below for more details.



Advanced Searching

Use quotes to search for a phrase in the product database that is exactly the same as the one you want.

For example a search for "large blue widget" would find ONLY items with that exact phrase in their title. So something called a large blue and green widget wouldn't appear.
You can enclose some of your search words in quotes, and not others. For example a search for large "blue widget" would find blue widgets only, with large blue widgets being favoured in the results listing, followed by other types of blue widget.


Use the plus sign to make sure certain words are found.

Put a + immediately in front of words you absolutely must have in your search results. For example a search for large blue +widget would show you only items with widget in the title - and ones that include the words large and blue would be shown first. This would avoid showing products like large blue teapots, if you're only interested in widgets.

Use a minus sign to exclude certain words from the search results.

If you want to search for large widgets, but NOT blue ones, you could do the following search: large widgets -blue

Use OR to search for alternative words

For example the following search: large widgets (blue or green) would show blue or green widgets higher in the results list than other colours of widget.
The or function can also be useful when searching for variations of a word. For example if you were searching for playstation two games, you might want to include (playstation or PS2) to include items that use the PS2 abbreviation rather than the full word.


You can combine these features - so for example if you wanted to look for only large widgets, that are blue or green, but not red, you could enter the following in the search box: +large + widget (blue or green) -red