I agree that it has become a lot harder to find worthwhile things in recent days. The way they changed categories (in the Sports section anyway) makes absolutely no sense, and between exorbitant fees and a structure that favors high quantity, fixed price sellers, eBay is completely departing from its roots. Now browsing is near impossible between the fixed price listings and crap from China littering the search results. With any luck, Google will come out with an auction service in the near future. They have already developed a PayPal competitor in Google Checkout. Okay... done with the rant -- now an attempt to be helpful.
In case anyone doesn't know them already, here are various eBay search operators explained:
http://pages.ebay.com/help/search/search-commands.html
I especially like the wildcard (*). You can use it to find things you might otherwise miss -- for example a search that is: Hank Aaron (auto*,sig*) will turn up anything that has Hank Aaron and any word beginning with those roots -- auto, autograph, autographed, sig, signature, signed, etc. The same can be done to eliminate reprints -- a search that is: t206 -(rp,repr*) will show anything that has t206 in the title and exclude any auctions that have rp, reprint, repro, reproduction. While these are by no means perfect, they help to knock out a lot of the junk. Look through the various options in the advanced search to find even more ways to optimize a search. You can save searches you use frequently in My eBay so you don't need to type in a long string every time.
You can also get rid of the fixed price listings by clicking the "auctions only" tab at the top.
This
link will take you to a search that reveals basically only "legit" Hank Aaron autographs (as in, reprint/fake is not revealed in the title) that are being auctioned off. That allows you to see things listed in categories other than the obvious "Autographs-Original" and gets rid of all overpriced BIN and reprinted 8x10s that are on there.
If you get creative you can produce searches that are pretty effective, though obviously imperfect.
Hopefully everything I said isn't obvious to everybody and helps someone out!