all i know is a few years ago it was very easy to search for specific items and browse in general, looking for something interesting to buy.
eBay has changed the way that searches work, so if you are still searching the same way you were years ago, that may be part of the problem. And sellers have changed the way they list and sell, which also contributes to this issue.
My days of browsing ended a few years ago when ebay started including more and more unrelated items in the search results. It became just too much to wade through.
There are probably some things you can do to get better, more targeted results if you are interested.
It's up to them how they run their search engine but just because there are buyers finding what they are looking for doesn't mean there couldn't be many, many more buyers finding what they are looking for, dramatically increasing ebay's revenue, with a more common sense approach search engine.
That is certainly possible. But eBay has a vested interest in making things as easy as possible for marginal users, and eBay has far more data at its disposal than you or I do about how users are searching, and how many are finding things and buying them versus how many are giving up. If there is some simple change that makes things easier (or at least does not make things any harder on net), that should lead to increased sales and eBay should be eager to discover and implement such changes.
The fact that eBay has not made a change already may be because no one at eBay has thought of such a change (unlikely, but possible), or that eBay calculates the change is too costly to implement to be worth it, or the change may have other drawbacks that you or I may not have fully considered (highly likely).
Many of the suggestions I see for "changes" to search don't really add anything new, they just move the existing default options around to suit individuals. Two exceptions I can think of off the top of my head are wildcard searches and the option to search title-only. Wildcards are not coming back for a variety of reasons, but eBay could certainly implement a title-only search option at very little cost. If enough users demand it, eBay may implement it as an available option.
And i am not one of the buyers who is finding what they are looking for.
What are you looking for that you cannot find? There are a few things I can think of that are harder to search for now than they were previously -- mostly due to category changes where there is no widely used filter option or keyword available to search (such as "classic cars"), but for most things there are multiple ways to search and find things. And to sort and filter.
It may not necessarily always be the first way you think of to search, or the way you were used to searching in the past, but there is a vast gulf between a search being "useless" and being "not quite as easy as I would prefer".
It's strange how some people will always jump to ebay's defense, no matter what bonehead moves they make.
eBay certainly makes changes that I do not approve or that I would prefer they not make, and not every feature that eBay implements is implemented well, but I tend to think that eBay has reasons for what eBay does even if I can't always understand or explain those reasons. eBay has incentive to maximize profitable sales, and users being able to find things to buy is a very large part of that. If there are vast numbers of users that cannot find things to purchase, then eBay is leaving a lot of money on the table.
The choices eBay makes don't always make things easier for me, but eBay is not trying to maximize my utility (nor should it), eBay is trying to maximize the utility of millions of users with different preferences than my own.
