Posted By:
Jeff SJay offers one potential reason why eBay has relegated completed auctions to obscurity.
Here's another: it's fairly common practice for deals to be made post-auction (that is, without eBay getting their final value fee), and many of those deals result from someone finding a completed item that got no bids.
If people don't search completed items, they can't make offers to sellers, so sellers have to re-list, which ultimately means more listing fees and more final value fees. And, while we're at it, less bandwidth usage due to search functions.