Well over a year later, tiny, tiny creatures trying to take over the planet, etc, I have this same problem.
I often need to search using terms like "3.5mm", "6.3mm", "6.35mm", "2mm", and so on.
Recently, I needed to use "1.5mm" and "0.3M" - but neither search term does anything useful, any more.
For example, trying to find a small pinion, to fit a 1.5mm diameter motor shaft - these exist, and ebay claims to "have everything"... So,
"1.5mm" pinion
- 446 results, maybe 3 of them relevant. As it turns out, probably zero useful, but that's now a lot harder to verify.
Did I wander onto Amazon by mistake?
The one thing that really made eBay work, for me, was a search engine that returned relevant results, and had some relatively powerful search term parsing - including the simple requirement of literal text, in quotes.
So, some idiot (and I use the term advisedly), decided to make the search engine replace "." with just a space, even if the "." was inside quotes.
Needle in haystack - difficult situation, but not something we're not used to dealing with.
Needle in much bigger haystack - much worse.
Why, I have to ask myself, do these people still get paid? There are far better programmers asking for spare change, outside my local mini market.
