as I DIY a lot and also prefere to get my gear without the "premium price tag" of European resellers, I order things very often directly from China via Ebay. Its the general market place in the web, its quite save, a lot of offers arround the world....oh and you get fucked over quite hard:

If you use the search function in Ebay with "world wide" enabled (and who doesn't?) it does not display all offers that match your search words. It filters out many auctions that 100% match your search, especially offers from China!

I had this issue with Olympus pro lenses for arround $2000 from Japan and tiny parts for soldering for $0.50 from China. I typed in some words to search, got 0 hits and the exact item I was looking for was displayed in the "more items related to.." below. I used copy&paste of that auction headline into the search window and again got 0 hits. I clicked on the item, the auction/item was display properly and also stated that this seller has 935 other items for sale. Klicking on "see other items" resulted in 0 items found.

I was using ebay Germany. So I tried ebay USA - some items got now "found" properly, others didn't. Lately I was using ebay Germany but with a proxy server in between - this looked like it showed all results. If ebay doesn't know where you sit, it doesn't know what to filter for.

I contacted ebay support with this issue:

1. "It can take time to display your auctions properly" - automatic answer, totally off topic.
2. "You should update your browser and enable cookies. The ebay search function is working fine." - standart reply, off topic.
3. "Can you please give an example of that problem" - wow! I did.
4. "We had a look at your problem. This is a KNOWN issue. We are working on it." - What?! Now its a known problem...and not solved..?

But...they solved the problem: Today I was using a proxy server again to get some "single row 2.54mm round pin male headers" for PCB soldering and the proxy-method doesn't work anymore. And it will take them not much time to adjust the "related items..." search function aswell to not display auctions that are not "good" for you.

The only way I know of now to find all items that match a search frase is using Google. But as Google scanns through all listings from time to time, its not up to date and very often you find what you are looking for, but the auction allready ended.

Has anybody any ideas how to get around this censorship?

But a week ago, Google decided to launch a re-designed interface that hid most options, required more clicks, and move them to the top where they could only be used with an animated reveal (that you had to wait for) in order to make the desktop based image search more consistent with mobile use.

Worse still, the have "temporarily" removed the ability to specific "larger than" or "exact size" image options when searching. Now you can only specify three vague categories of size at best, and even that takes several clicks!

Over a 170 people have posted complaints in the last week in the official Google group at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/xcv50_kJ9Pc/ApEqKbCI8u4J but it may take a lot more for Google to get the idea people do NOT like having functionality randomly removed for no apparent reason and that desktop users do NOT like having their functionality impacted just to make things "consistent" with mobile users.

If you have Twitter or Facebook and agree, please share this post. https://twitter.com/PerLichtman/status/268864289429929984

If you want to let Google know directly, please post to the official thread. https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/xcv50_kJ9Pc/ApEqKbCI8u4J

We couldn't stop Panasonic from ditching an MAR sensor, but this IS something we can do something about. Google has changed similar things in the past in response to public outcry.