Our customer service team is often asked questions about the best ways to search on Alibaba.com. With thousands of products, trade leads and companies online, you will probably find it difficult to find exactly what you are looking for on your first attempt. But all is not lost. In this tutorial, I am going to be looking at how you can improve the relevance of your search results so that the products, trade leads or companies that you want will appear within the first page of search results.

In my experience, I have found that a focused and precise search may take more than one attempt. If you cannot find what you are looking for and do not have a lot of time, it is usually a better idea to begin your search again rather than browse through a large number of search result pages.

We will begin our look at improving search results with a brief look at how to choose keywords, and then we'll discuss a few easy techniques that I use to improve my search results and save me time.

When I am deciding which keywords to use, I find that I get the best results when using keywords that are very specific. Although using only one or two keywords does return more results, the results I actually want may be buried within a lot of similar but non-specific results.

To tackle this problem, I try to use at least four or five keywords to narrow down my search and choose my keywords remembering that Alibaba.com's search engine returns results based on:

1. Keywords
2. Subject
3. Content
   

Using quotation marks (" ") is a powerful way to limit search results. I use quotation marks when I only want search results that match a complete phrase, e.g., "bottle washing machine."

In the above example, only pages that have the words bottle, washing and machine next to each other (and in this specific order) will be included within search results.

Using multiple keywords for a search will return search results containing each and every keyword entered, i.e., word 1 and word 2 and word 3. If you would like a particular word to feature more heavily within you search results, a plus sign (+) can be used to tell the search engine which word you consider to be the most important.

Note: Plus signs can also be used together with phrases in quotation marks.

It is important to remember that plus (+) signs must be preceded by a space and must touch the word that they relate to.

Sometimes I find that it is necessary to remove closely related items from my search results. This is done with the use of a minus sign (-) which is a very powerful way to remove words that you do not want to appear in your search results.

In the above example, the search engine will disregard any results for laptop computers that contain the word "adapter." When using minus signs to remove words from search results, you must remember that the minus sign needs to be preceded by a space and must touch the word/phrase that you want to remove from search results, i.e., -notebook computer is not the same as -"note book computer". In the first example, only the word notebook will be excluded.

When I want to broaden my search results, I use an asterisk (*) to act as as either a number or letter. Wildcards are used by placing them at the end of a word or partial word. For example, note* would return search results starting with note, including note or notebook or notepad, etc.

Keyword: A word or phrase used when searching for information in search engines.
Wildcard: A special character such as an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) that can be used to represent one or more characters in a word or term entered into a search query.

I hope that this tutorial has been of helpful. If you would like post a comment about this tutorial or submit an idea for a future tutorial, please feel free to send me a message using the feedback box below.

Milton