Using the minus sign in front of a word no longer works in Search?

[ColorfulCastAndCrew]

Has anyone found a workaround for this?  I searched the forums trying to figure out why putting a minus sign in front of a word no longer works to weed it out during Search. I found a thread from 2020 where everyone was complaining it was a recent change. I'm looking for a leather bag, I do not want vegan leather. I suppose I could just increase my price point to hopefully weed vegan leather out, does anyone know of any other workarounds or is this the new and improved version for Search?

[anythinggoeshere]

Have you tried putting the search you are looking for in parentheses.

[ColorfulCastAndCrew]

I haven't, I'll try that, thank you.

[JMOldeVintage]

@ColorfulCastAndCrew - The minus sign hasn't worked in Etsy's search for ages.

You can try the quote marks to narrow down the search a bit. I just did "leather purse" and got over 200K results. Filtering for Handmade reduced the results to just over 178K results. 
Page one still had at least one "vegan" leather result. In other words, shop owners selling vinyl, synthetic (can I add a blast from the past "naugahyde"?) items probably still use the word "leather" somewhere in their titles or tags. 

Your next big challenge will be finding something you like but then doing a google image search. The only safe thing to do if you're concerned about finding true handmade or authentic vintage.

[BonnyCollections]

As a cattle rancher I had never heard the term "vegan" leather. Thanks for explaining that! lol

[CustomPortraitArt]

Buyers don't necessarily know different tricks to accomplish what the simple minus sign does.

They just leave.

Of all the improvements of search, this simple fix would be most helpful.

[howtobooksandmore]

I think this stopped working when etsy introduced AI.  Just another reason why Asinine Intelligence doesn't work.