I know it's a lame, thumb-twiddling question, but does anyone feel as I do that the eBay search engine has basically been going downhill since it first started? I mean, is it better or worse than it was, say five or seven years ago? Or roll it way back 10+ years? I've been a regular eBay'er since the late 90's and can't help but feel I've lost the fine tune control I used to have.

Obviously the regular UI upgrades and enhancements eBay rolls out periodically are guaranteed to upset a vocal minority such as myself that hate change once we have it "hooked up just right", but it also seems that the basic ability to make fine and detailed searches has gotten harder and harder as time goes by.

I used to save long, clever and complicated searches that pulled in all sorts of goodies - now I need to break everything down into clumsy short strands with limited coverage and pulling power or I get poor and incomplete results, or nothing at all.

Anyone?

i've got the same problem, almost with every modern search tool.

There made for mobile devices, showing less results on one page, which makes it much more difficult to find stuff.

Ebay has also gotten way too popular, there's just too much crap to find quickly what you're looking for.

Not sure of any particular changes but Ebay still seems to work great for my needs and my current restoration project. Perhaps the search feature doesn't perform as well as in the past (I now have to try wording my searches differently) but for example I did find one vendor offering a set of new Victor Victrola Talking Machine governor springs for the VV model easy enough along with free shipping. I've already decided where I'm going to buy the parts but it is good to have an alternative.

I used to have a nice Mac adventure game search saved in My Ebay, but the categories changed to something more general, which means I have to winnow a lot of chaff to find what I want.

those old searches we all crafted haven't worked well for some time now - if you put all those nice variables in it sort of craps out.

the "autocorrect" spelling feature does my head in - if a search results in 0 hits, I want to see that, not be re-directed to daipers or keychains. they buried "search completed items" 3 clicks in Other Buying Formats flyout. why? no idea.

a particular irritant that started about a month ago is it continually/randomly defaults to large icons/25 items/compacted information UI - a sort of tablet approch that make no sense for regular PC users. I'm always having to clear the cache to get back the good UI. 

also, the little box to search descriptions - which they bury in Advanced Search. Why? no idea.

my worry is they see cellphone/tablets as their target audience rather that simply craft funtional UIs for both small and normal screen formats.

The ebay search worked Ok for me. Last nite/early this morning I searched for a used laptop (a broken one) for $0 - $25, free S & H, found one and ordered it. I'm going to use that laptop to gain my tech experience hands-on since I have several laptop repair books so I can learn how to fix broken laptops and give them to charity some day (poor people that cannot afford a laptop).

oh don't get me wrong, eBay still works! - I'm just grousing about the never ending fiddling around they do with the UI, and what I see as a search ability trending downwards, in the sense that it will not accept the longer more concise/clever group searches it used to.

It is very annoying how much it changes.

They recently got rid of the "Search completed listings" when you're simply browsing/searching, instead you now have to go to advanced searching which takes a lot longer/is more annoying.

Not to mention how annoying it is that the placements change. I mean so many times you'll think something you want to click when searching (IE condition of item, location, etc) is in one place, then it's suddenly moved lower/higher then it used to be.

One of the Ebay UIs that popped up one day had tabs along the top for search Completed Items and search Sold Items. Very handy but with the same stroke they buried the even more useful Search Item Descriptions tick box into Advanced Search settings. I just don't get why they can't offer comprehensive Settings/Custimization.

For similar reasons I've been experimenting with new Browsers. I upgraded to IE9 from IE8 and got the vaunted "blurry text" issue whcih several hours of troubleshooting did not satisfactorily correct.  A bunch of people I know gave up on IE because of the test issue and now I'm one. My favorite so far is Opera - it has a clean, simple UI that is very customizable and I'm giving that a go now. 

Interesting. Since "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" the ebay interface has been stable. Nice. Seems like they experimented with a lot of bad ideas, then went back to what worked..

Yeah it seems they came to their senses and you can easily click to search "completed" listings (and even "sold" listings, which shows you only items that sold) which is very helpful.

F*@k! eBay is back to their tricks. Now it's a tablette format with all the info in clumps with large pix of items. The smallest image size is still huge. This is reminding me of playing old dos games on a new computer. WTF!

Purging cache and all the little tricks with no results so far. Had eBay given up on the desktop users?

Sorry for the bitching but...

Time to bump this thread. The new year brought a major face lift to eBay USA's search and information display interface that basically eviscerates the system's ease of use and functionality. Yikes - it's almost unusable in it's current form. Making matters worse little tricks that worked before - clearing cookies and cache - don't work this time around. I've been onboard since April 2000 and this is by far the worst turn of events - and there have been quite a few...

The UK and "commonwealth" sites still operate as before so I've resorted to surfing with them, but as a solution it's far from optimal.

Any dedicated eBayer's care to comment?