Hi Sue:
You're right eBay's search is broken, irrevokably messed up, trash, unadulterated poop. And they have the gall to tell us that their core business is their primary concern. Hurumph!

Now that the nasty part is over -- for some reason there are days when it is possible to search and actually get results. However, it isn't predictable. Ever since your last post (the witch incident) about searching I've gone on at least once a day and tried some random searches that should pull up at least one of my auctions and several others too. I've kept a list of what I've searched for and the search results. It appears from my non-scientific biased study that the SHORTER your search string is the more likely that you will get a hit. Even if you place something in quotes and you know it is going to be there, such as the aw2k string at the bottom of the page, threre is no predictability on success. So far the success rate for quoted searches has been awful. Only two were found out of 37. That is not a good record for any company's search let alone eBay's in house search engine. I should have gotten a bunch of hits each of the 37 times but didn't.

I don't wish to be a conspiracy theorist but it is as if eBay is forcing people to browse the auctions. Making them go to search and finding only a few "suggestions" those famous hits they show with a line drawn through words. That way those suggestions will be clicked on by a prosepective buyer and in some instances will end up finding something. But this isn't fair in any way shape or manner - the buyer is finding the item, A seller is making a sale, and eBay is getting their cut. The bad part of this equation is that every other eBay seller is not on equal footing in that search is just plain broken and eBay isn't attempting to fix it cause they are making sales through the suggestions.

Sorry, off my soap box now, but that is what I have been able to find out with my daily testing of search.

I saw where Judy gave you the directions to get the notation back at the bottom of your auctions. And I agree with Judy, there is no way they can make you take that off. Just think of all the auctiva, and turbolister and on and on and on. So just tell the eBay rep thanks and put what ever you feel you want at the bottom of your auction page.

Garry