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Parts for your Porsche? Looking for a special car?

Here’s a little known trick you can use to find exactly what you need.

Some of you know that my main business is search engine optimization (SEO), meaning I help businesses structure their websites in such a way that their pages appear at the top of a search result page when someone conducts a search. So it stands to reason that I also know a few tricks to use when it comes to doing really specific searches when I want to buy a part for my car. And no, I’m not talking about going on eBay and entering “Boxster wheels” and pushing search.

I’m talking about power searching.

Last year, I wanted to find a hardtop for my 2002 Boxster. I checked eBay and PCA’s The Mart but didn’t find a whole lot to look at and I wanted to try Craigslist. But when you try to search Craigslist, you have to pick a specific local version to start your search. If you start with New Haven, your screen looks like this:

Look on the right side. There are 30 other versions that are “nearby” as well as cities and states in other parts of the country. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to search every Craigslist ad in every city at the same time?

There is. It’s called a power search.

Power searches aren’t unique to Craigslist. They use advanced search operators that modify searches to narrow searches and drill deeper into results. 

Back to my hardtop. To search all of Craigslist for a hardtop for a 986 Boxster, I go to Google and type the following text into the address box at the top of my browser.

The words site:craigslist.org tells Google that I only want to see results for craigslist.org. The word intitle:boxster hardtop tells the search engine that I only want to see search results that contain boxster and hardtop in the title of the ad.

When you click Enter, Google will show you a search result page that looks a little bit like this:

A quick scan of the results lists Craigslist listings for hardtops in Portland, LA, San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, etc. But that search is a little bit too broad. I don’t want a hardtop lift. So let’s refine the search a little bit.

See that little change? I added -intitle:lift to the query. That tells Google that I want to see all the listings for boxster and hardtop but I want to exclude listings that contain the word lift. But I still see listings for 987’s and I have a 986. So a little more refinement might be in order.

Say you’re not interested in parts, but a special car – like a 914-6? Just change your search parameters to intitle:porsche914-6 and viola:

This week, I got new wheels for the Boxster. How did I find them? The same way.

Happy searching.

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