As of today, I can no longer search eBay by the decade ...

[thecatspajamas]

Eric, that works for the limited scenario of searching for items by decade (albeit with a lot more typing).

What it does not account for though is unpredictable descriptions and/or human error. By not allowing wildcards, the searcher now has to anticipate every spelling and grammatical variation that the seller might use. It's not just listing out every year in the 1930's for by-the-decade searches (also add in 1930s for those sellers who don't give a specific year), but suppose you're searching for Yastrzemski items? How many different ways do you think sellers will misspell that? And to pick them all up, you would have to anticipate ALL of them, not just search for "Carl Ya*"