Using Ebay to Locate Treasure Sites |
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| I can imagine your first reaction to this title, "What!" how in the world can Ebay or any auction site possibly help me find a treasure/metal detecting site in my area. But that just proves my reason for this topic, your not using another resource available to you on the Internet. If you aren't looking on eBay, you could be missing something that will lead you a unknown and unhunted site! There are so many web sites out there, you just have to use your imagination and adapt these sites to your needs. Another plus to auctions is you save time. You can spend your Saturday driving around to every junk shop and flea market in your state or search Ebay in your spare time from your home. Spend your Saturdays on a hunt. OK, you got me convinced how can I use Ebay for research? Come on, I'll show you how. |
| Ebay is what is know as an "auction site". You can find almost ANYTHING on Ebay, and I do mean ANYTHING. From the obscure to the downright strange, I am still amazed at what people sell and even more at what people buy. And usually you get the item for a better price than in an antique shop or old bookstore. |
| What are some of the items you should look for? Search for any item that could possibly lead you to a lead on a possible treasure site. Items such as: Old maps, books, pictures, old documents, postcards anything that is related to the area or topic you are interested in. All of these items could contain hints or a mention of a likely site. One thing to remember is to check back at auction sites frequently, at the minimum every week, as most Ebay auctions last a week. New items are added hourly. It is amazing of the number of items on Ebay, easily numbering in the millions. |
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Using Ebay |
| First off, goto the Ebay web site: http://www.ebay.com/ Look for the field (or box) under "What are you looking for?". |
| Type the word: map pennsylvania Click the "Find It" button. This returns 85 items with 50 items to a page. Going through the items in this list, I found this interesting item: a 1911 map of Armstrong County for $5.95. Note: If you try this example you will not get the same results as when I did it. Most Ebay auctions last a week. |
| Now, try this: Click on the "box" on the left where it says, "Search titles and descriptions (to find more items!)" so that the box has a checkmark in it. NOTE: The word "map pennsylvania" is still in the search field. Now, Click on the "Search" button. |
| Now there are even more items (534 in my case). If the results are in the thousands, (yes it will happen) there are ways to narrow the results. Doing a search this way returns more items, but these may be totally unrelated to what we are looking for. My search returned items from "state quarters" to "teddy bears". This is because you are not just searching titles of auction items, but also the description of the item for sale. Some items are described in very great detail. |
| How can we narrow the results down? In the search field enter -quarter -bear to "map pennsylvania" and press the "Search" button. This eliminated about 70 items. We just removed any auction that has the word "quarter" or the word "bear" in the title or description. If the results are still too many, just keep adding keywords to remove items. |
| You can do searches on eBay using the exact same methods you do on the Alta Vista search engine. It works great, and you can really "fine tune" your searches and find exactly what you want quickly. Click here for more help on using search engines. Example of finding items on a certain state or county: In this case, I want items on Pennsylvania maps of Armstrong county. So I will use these key words, like this: map +pennsylvania +armstrong |
| IMPORTANT: Enter the keywords as in above example. Note how it looks map(space)+(NO space)pennsylvania and also note that it is in all lower case letters. This returned one item. Well maybe next week. Now, try looking for items in states or counties that you are interested in. |
| Note: This past week (2/23/01) I found two items on Ebay. One was a photo postcard of a CCC camp and the other was a postcard of a newly completed dam. The dam postcard shows houses on the hillside that I know are longgone. I check Ebay weekly, doing searches on town names. I plan on trying to locate the CCC camp this spring. |
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Conclusion |
| It does not cost anything to bid at Ebay, but you do have to be registered to bid. Fee's to sell an item are based on the opening bid and a percentage of the selling price. See the Ebay site for the latest information. Ebay is not the only auction site available, here are some other auction sites to look into: http://auctions.yahoo.com/ http://www.amazon.com/ |
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On a related Ebay topic, you can use Ebay and other auction sites to get Please email me any comments about this article. |
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