Did anyone notice that ebay in various countries omit certain international stores/sellers from their internal search engine? And more - they try to hide their store content. It's now also happening on the .com domain. Now, these are not exclusively ethno-botanical stores and sellers, but all kinds of regular stuff. For example, one of our favourite Chinese sellers of "suleymani style agate beads" with 100% positive ratings fails to show up in the (ebay) search engine, and even when we click on his store it says: "zero items to display" while in reality he has 5000+ items that are up for sale, here and now. Now we don't know if it's a bug (we don't think so) or perhaps this is done to un-boost sales from other countries, or due to paypal's wicked terms of services (probably). Sometimes we switch ebay-country-domains, and sometimes it works, but not always. Another way we found is, that if we know a certain phrase that only our favourite seller uses (such as "nonpareil", "..........."...etc), one can try to do a google search for that particular word - followed by "ebay". However, browsing through that users other items will still be difficult, unless he/she added an auctiva widget to it.
Anyway, all this isn't really satisfactory, neither does it explain why this is happening. We contacted ebay on this, but they would not elaborate on this. There are rumours (spread by ebay forum mods) that this is a punitive action against sellers who, despite getting 100% ratings, did not get all of the stars markings in regard to the five other questions. But that would be equally outragous because others with bad ratings are still on display...(?)

What are your experiences with this problem?
Any tricks and workarounds?