What you really need to search for is
"Ladies" "Shorts"
Searching on
"Ladies Shorts" will not return items with titles of the likes of '
Ladies Blue Cotton Shorts'.
'Ladies' and 'Shorts' are both plurals, so the search engine, unless commanded otherwise, will also return hits on the singulars of 'Lady' and 'Short'.
The failure to match on both singular and plural of words was something sellers were complaining of a while back, and eBid did a lot of work to make the search engine do so.
What it comes down to is users understanding how search engines work and how to get the best out of them.
Probably what could be done is for eBid to place a link 'Searching Tips' in each search box pointing to
http://uk.ebid.net/help_bid.php#1