Keyword search too restrictive

[zsau]

I searched for the terms "war peace" (without quotes), intending to find Tolstoy's War and Peace. But the only result I got was Lay Down Your Arms. I'd likely have assumed you didn't have it and gone elsewhere, had I not known there was a translation in the public domain and that the work is such a classic.

"war and peace" (again without quotes) does find Tolstoy's work, and oddly enough doesn't list Lay Down Your Arms. Both searches behave the same with quotes, which leads me to guess that the unquoted version is being treated as though it had quotes. And I'd further guess that this is the reason Lay Down Your Arms gets returned for the query "war peace".

[acabal]

When preparing the query the system puts quotes around it, so if you had searched for war and peace you would have found the ebook.

Not sure if removing double quotes would improve search results at all, instead of muddying them significantly. @colagrosso what do you think?

[zsau]

I don't know of any major search engine that quotes by default; it's far too restrictive. Better to return more results than less, as long as the ranking algorithm is decent.

Besides, if you don't auto-quote then users can choose to quote when they want. I'm sure there are many who don't know about quoting, yes, but the fact that quotes work in Google etc should help.