• Home
•  | Why Use Us
•  | Help
•  | Contact

Search Instructions

To help you find what you're looking for even more quickly, our site supports some rather advanced search capabilities. You don't even have to search for an "advanced search" function - our "basic" search does it all.

Battery Force Advanced Search Features

Some of the more commonly used features include:

AND logic

When you specifiy multiple terms in your search, the results will include only those products which match ALL of the words you give.

Quoting

If you want to match a whole phrase (which includes phrases) you can "quote it" using double quotes.

Case insensitivity

UPPER or lower case is ignored by the search function; you can use either.

Full word matching

By default, only full word matches count. For example, if you search for 1130 and a product in our database happens to have a manufacturer's part number of ABC1130, your search would not match this product.

Exploration

If your search includes multiple terms, the results page will also show the approximate number of matches for each individual term, as if it were used as a search on its own. If you're not getting as many results as you expected, this can help you widen your search to find more results.

Negative criteria

To exclude products, you can prefix a term by an exclamation mark (!) or a minus-sign (-).

Attribute Filters

You can filter products based on attributes in our product database. In general, a search term will combine and attribute-name, an operator and a filter-operand. Sounds tricky, but is quite simple. The attribute-names are things like brand, weight and name. The operators include < (is less than), > (is greater than), = (equals) and : (matches). There should be no spaces on either side of the operator. For example, to search for all products branded Duracell, you would simply include the term: brand=Duracell in your search. See below for some examples.

Sample Searches

Exploring is the spirit of the web, so here are some examples to try:

• weight<100 All products with a weight less than 100 grammes.
• -weight>100 All products, excluding those with a weight greater than 100 grammes.
• aa voltage>1.5 All products with 'AA' size (or derivatives thereof) and a voltage greater than 1.5V.
• aa nimh battcap>2000 All products with 'AA' size, 'NIMH' technology and a capacity greater than 2000mAh.
• cheap available>100 All products we put into our "cheap" catgeory, of which more than 100 are available now.
• "brand=battery force" All products with a Battery Force brand. Note the double quotes which are required becuase the search term includes a space, and also note that they quote the entire term (not just the operand).

Advanced Hints and Tips

If you've reached this part of the page, you're obviously interested in the full power of the search function.

• For even more functionality, you can also use the : (matches) operator. For example, name:ll will search for all products which have a name that includes a double-ell. The matches operator understands a small subset of basic regular expressions, including the . (full stop) which matches any single character, as well as the + (plus) and * (star) quantifiers.
• The comparison operators (<, > and =) perform numeric comparison if both your search operand and the attribute data are numeric, and perform a textual (i.e. lexical) comparison otherwise. Case (UPPER or lower) is always ignored. The available operators are:
  • < a left-pointing angle bracket, to mean "is less than"
  • > a right-pointing angle bracket, to mean "is greater than"
  • = the equals sign, to mean "equals"
  • : a colon, to mean "matches", which treats your search operand as a very basic regular expression, and attempts to match this against attribute data
• The attributes you'll find most useful include:
  • weight product weight, including packaging
  • name product name or title, which normally consists of a brand name, followed by a few words identifying the particular product, followed by pack size
  • available the quantity available, no more than 30 minutes out of date
  • brand brand name
  • height, width, depth, diameter physical dimensions of the unpacked product - but unfortunately its less useful than you may think, because maybe we're holding the product differently to how you would, and what we've called "width", you may call "depth"
• Some additional attributes, which not all products will have, include those below. If your search includes an attribute, but the database does not include data for this atrribute for a particular product, the search function treats this as not matching.
  • voltage e.g. battery or mains voltage
  • battcap battery capacity