I like ebay. I like the fact that there's weird and wonderful items
about to go under the hammer, sometimes for rock-bottom prices.

Ebay lets me search for items about to be sold, but I have to pick a
category or pick a search word.

I can pick a word, such as 'new' and then filter by 'ending soonest',
but then I only get the items with 'new' in their description plus I
get a lot of items with a high starting price or a high 'buy it now'.
Perhaps the best bargains are those that already have a bidder?

Can anyone work out a way of searching for bargains which are about to
go under the hammer at ebay UK?

Try entering just a single common letter such as "a" for all
catagories. This should bring up any listings containing the letter
"a" which should be a fair few straight away.

Then tick the "search title and description" box directly under the
search box. This should then list any items with the letter "a"
anywhere within both the title and the entire advert text.

Can't imagine there are many items that would slip through this
search, but just to make sure try searching for "e" "i" "o" and "u" as
well...!

Finally, under the location tab down the left hand side of the page
select "worldwide" instead of "UK only" to maximize the search
potential.

Good luck, Mark.

Ebay is a nearly perfectly efficient marketplace and thus items will
tend to sell for very close to their true value. The advantage to it
is you can find unusual or rare items not too many other folks may
want, like a 1972 Mercury Montego, a Honda CM-400A, or a collection of
Gerry Anderson's "UFO" someone recorded off TV a few years before it
came out on VHS or DVD.

Now Craigslist, on the other hand...

As 'e' is the most common letter in the English language, just use 'e'
as in Mark's comment above, but then under search options also choose
to show
   Listings 
    ending within
     1 hour, 2 hours etc

and you can also restrict to items in the UK only.

at the time of writing there are about 4500 items returned in this criteria