Help! How do I get Ebay search to narrow it down to only items matching search words

[goldrushfinds]

I am exasperated. Seems to me that the Ebay search is becoming worse and worse. Case in point, I am trying to list a pair of men's "SAS High Street Lace Up" shoes/sneakers. The manufacturer's site calls the shoes  "Men's High Street Lace Up Sneakers". So to keep it more wide open I searched "Mens SAS High Street" (also ran search "Mens SAS High Street Sneakers". The results show me a few matching the title but hundreds of other shoes, along with many women's shoes. I then put quotation marks around "High Street", which then narrowed it down to only a few shoes, leaving out the vast majority of this style from the search. I can't find a way anymore to quickly assess active listings vs solds (sell through rate). Help appreciated. 

[eburtonlab]

eburtonlab can tell you how to Search with somewhat of a 70% accuracy.
But, he just can't forward his knowledge to potential shoppers in advance

Most folks still seem to be able to search and find things to purchase without any assistance.

Knowing a few practical details of how eBay's search actually works can help with some specific searches, but that is hardly a requirement to be able to find something to buy.

A relatively small number of power-users want to be able to perform very complex searches that return complete results in order to do research, and some of those users may even wind up asking questions on community boards such as this one, but those are not really the sort of search results that eBay is designed to deliver by default.

[chariot_badges]

Most folks still seem to be able to search and find things to purchase without any assistance.

I think many have learned that searching on Google is better.

Which, in a way, feeds into eBay steering us to 'external promotions'.

I don't know if that's intentional but, remember, eBay is not an honest or transparent company.

Problem with that is ... it offers much more than just our inventory.

Factory, third party, amazon ... the competition.

If somebody wants to go directly to eBay, it should not be discouraged.

[gottasellemall69]

https://developer.ebay.com/support/kb-article?KBid=2190

Are we both missing the mark here haha?
Was browsing around and found this, but not sure how correct/relevant it still is.

[eburtonlab · Accepted solution]

Are we both missing the mark here haha?
Was browsing around and found this, but not sure how correct/relevant it still is.

If you use commas inside of parentheses, that will allow you to separate individual terms you want to search for in a Boolean OR search.

If you use commas outside of parentheses, the comma will match any other punctuation mark by the search -- that is, equivalent to any other punctuation mark or a space in the item title or item-specifics.

Note that a leading dash or minus sign is treated specially in search to signal a Boolean NOT operation.

So you can, in fact, search for an exact phrase by separating the individual keywords with commas or dashes or periods or asterisks -- as long as there are no spaces between the search keywords -- and that will match those words in exact order (including spaces) in the results eBay finds.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/11233/i.html?_nkw=death%2Cby%2Cchocolate&rt=nc&LH_ItemCondition=3