Is there a way to prevent ebay search from doing whatever it feels like instead of what I type?

[mostly_broncos]

For example I type the word "roll"  in search  I'm in the coins subcategory and it moves me to all categories. 

There are thousands of results in coins why would it decide to move me out of a category I just navigated to?

Why if I type  "lot"  in the dollars category does it show the tree view off to the left with Morgan highlighted all by itself when there are thousands of results in the other dollar subcategories that it hides and by not showing the full tree it leaves me no way to navigate  to the category. I know it exists  but other buyers may not know there are at least 5 other subcategories in dollar .

If I navigate to a category then I want results in that category or I want to know there are no items there.  Very simple    idea  that hasn't worked properly in about 10 years it seems like .

This is a desktop computer I can't imagine how much more annoyed I'd be trying to search on a mobile device.

I like to browse categories , newly listed  or ending soonest.  Stop changing my choices for me I clicked the friggin button for a reason.

Another annoyance , best offer for almost everyone means buy now with best offer . If I search for items with best offer I don't want to see any auctions  that start at 99 cents  , the seller is going to decline any offer under 500 bucks  because its going to be bid up to 550  im trying to remove results  I don't want by clicking the best offer button not add  1000's of more results.

I don't want my spelling corrected either  I want a pure keyword search with no suggestions ever

[eburtonlab]

Gallery view is a big offender there , I never ever want to see anything in gallery view or list view with large thumbnails that should be a global set and forget option but it never stays set.

You should be able to set List view as your default using the Customize menu from any search results page:

Those customization settings may not always "take" on the first try, and may occasionally revert to a different default or need to be reset from time to time, but if you are able to set them up the way you like that should should allow you to maintain default settings when searching for quite a while.

[eburtonlab]

I use "face" as a keyword while sitting in the US coins / half dollar category I know for a fact there are hits in every single subcategory but the results only show hits in Kennedy , franklin, and walking liberty categories.

I suspect that is just a bug in the way the categories are displayed on the left side.

I tried a search for face in the half dollar category and got 620 results, and the categories shown on the left looked just as you described, despite the first result being in the Barber category:

I tried the search again using face half as keywords and got the same number of results, but additional categories were displayed on the left this time:

Clicking on the "More" option reveals the categories you are looking for:

In either search, the actual results returned appear to be identical.

[mostly_broncos]

I see what you are saying , the number of results is the same but info is missing from the categories list.

So it is returning those results you just can't easily click to the barber category. 

The reason I search this way a lot of times is to find items that may have been placed in the wrong category and therefore escaped notice of other searchers .

I remember a decade ago where it would put the number of results per category in parentheses after its name.  That was an excellent way to display the results that I miss very much. In your screenshots the categories are ranked by the number of hits which is almost as good  but not showing all of them  ruins it  for the most part.  

If I do that from advanced search it generally will show all of the categories  but not every time.

[eburtonlab]

The reason I search this way a lot of times is to find items that may have been placed in the wrong category and therefore escaped notice of other searchers .

I often combine similar sorts of searches: a very general search within a narrow category, plus a very specific keyword search in all categories to find items that might have been listed outside of the usual category.

Old eBay tips & tricks guides used to recommend searching for common misspellings of various keywords as a good way to find hidden deals, back before eBay started doing that automatically for most searches.

I remember a decade ago where it would put the number of results per category in parentheses after its name.

eBay currently shows the number in parentheses for various filter options on the search results page -- which I agree is extremely useful -- but not for each of the categories, unfortunately.