"doing searches and worrying about the results is going to do nothing to improve your ebay experience."

QUITE RIGHT as it is now apparently a useless exercise and the search results are obviously highly tainted!!

from a buyers point of view let me reassure you that it is loathsome to have the ebay server deliberately hiding things from me that I am attempting to locate and buy and I will now be looking at other avenues to purchase from as am realising that the ebay server is now costing me extra and the cheap items that I want are now being hidden and ebay is shoving their preferred sellers down my throat .. no more!!