Sue:
Nope, not a sexy topic but it sure is important. First of all you are sooo smart hiding that text. Don't know why it works, but I may have an idea. First though 99.99& of my auctions are white type on a black background. They search pretty well. I've noticed lately though that searching is getting worse and worse. I tried something on your auction. I searched for

propeller at end of broom

It didn't find anything but down below it gave me suggestions to check out:

Get more results with fewer keywords:
4 items found for propeller at end broom
912 items found for at end broom
1585 items found for propeller at end ....

your item was in all of them

First I thought they were taking out short words such as prepositions etc in the way that google does. But that's not it.

I ran a test on one of my auctions and was able to find almost every search I did but in a few had to go down to where they make suggestions and they threw out "short" word

One of the key things I have been acting on is to try to keep "short" words out of the title and first line of the description. Now I use bulleted text (white on black) and for some reason every time I switch off from that to regular paragraph text the ability to search goes way down.

Today in Ina Steiner's newsletter she had this:

Buyers Say eBay 'Favorite Searches' Feature is Broken
By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com
October 30, 2006
eBay shoppers are complaining that the "favorite searches" feature is broken. On the eBay discussion forum devoted to search issues, a buyer posted, "I have a list of Favorite Searches stored on My eBay. I use them once a week to check for stuff. I always get many hundreds of results. Today they all give me 0 results. Did eBay change something? Or, is something broken?"

So maybe it isn't just you. If buyers are noticing it in their favorite searches that used to work -- and they don't work now? eBay is messing up yet again.

Don't know if any of this helped or not but I'll try some searches later this evening and see what I can come up with using your auction. Oh yea, love the witch!

Garry