Of the tens of thousands of items offered for sale on eBay every day a small but significant proportion will have misspellings in their titles and their descriptions. An example would be the common typographic substitution 'camrea' instead of 'camera'. Anyone searching for the word 'camera' would never see the entry for 'camrea' and this item might never be bought.

Across the entirety of eBay therefore there are literally thousands of items for sale that no one will find because they have an unusual or non-standard spelling. If you could search eBay with a variety of these possible alternate spellings then you could find such items, snap them up cheaply and sell them on at a profit. Indeed, a simple search of eBay for the misspellings of 'camera' revealed the terms: 'camers', 'camer', 'camrea', 'amera', 'camra', 'camara', 'kamera' and 'kamra'.

Some of the substitutions are easy to work out. A common example being the n/m substitution because these keys are next to one another on the keyboard. A less obvious example is the r/l substitution. This occurs as the 'r' sound is relatively weak in English and can sometimes be interpreted as an 'l'. Then we have the common -ibl/able substitution at the end of words and the equally common - ize/-ise substitution. Another common error is the dropping of a single character from a name (often a vowel) so that 'camera' becomes 'cmera'.

It's actually possible to work-out what these rules are and generate an algorithm based upon them that will calculate all the permutations of misspelled words. Most such algorithms, however, also work out how likely a typographic error is to occur before using the word to search eBay. This way only the most frequent misspellings are presented to the user. 99% of the time this can be great as the results come back quickly. It's only in 1% of cases where a rare typographic error occurs that the drawback of this method is revealed and a product that might otherwise have been snapped-up very cheaply is lost.

Other systems (and a good example of this is the Searchspell tool (found at http://www.searchspell.com) which has a database of likely typographic errors which is searched for each keyword entered. A mixture of these two solutions provides the best possible coverage and this is what is given in the Nemeton eBay misspelling search tool (found at http:// www.celtnet.org.uk/auctions/synosearchresults.php). Using this tool it's possible to search eBay for misspelled items based on word and phrase searches. The tool also allows you to search any of the English language eBay sites, maximizing the items you can find.

Once you've sourced your item then it's simply a question of purchasing that item; hopefully as a massive saving and then selling it on at a profit. Here you can use eBay auctions to generate revenue in other eBay auctions. (But make sure you have correct spelling when you come to sell the item yourself!)

Dyfed Lloyd Evans is a web developer who has been writing code for over twenty tears and who now generates applications to make the surfing (and buying) experiences of others simpler. His latest project is an eBay search tool that can be found at Nemeton eBay search tool which also contains the novel misspelling search tool designed by him.