We recently raised an issue with Microsoft because users were reporting when using the global search, they could search exact matches by using inverted commas "Example" etc and this would bring back any records that have an exact match.

However when searching something like "C & W Fencing" this was matching on the word 'Fencing' and not the full string.

MS have advised this is expected behaviour - see comments below. Would be great if there was a way to find exact matches for queries like this.

We have some feedback from our Product Group informing that the behavior is the expected one:

Behavior1: The returned query results of any query mentioned below {query} is a combination of recall from ACS {###ByPassRankers=True###query} and suggestion cache {query}. On suggestion side, there will be no more than 6 records merged.

Behavior2: Relevance search cannot handle single character term well. This includes variations that contains AND operator between terms.

Details: When users are leveraging AND operator for search, no matter how they use this operator between search terms, we treat it as a strong signal to bypass BizQA query preprocessing and directly send it to ACS to get result to ask for exact match of those terms. As mentioned in below thread, relevance search (ACS) does not work well with single character terms, and will have difficulty finding target records. Its behavior will also behave differently (in a not satisfiable way) depending on how user add the AND operator between terms.

Example 1 {###ByPassRankers=True### C +& +W +Fencing} returns no result demonstrate that relevance search finds no result that satisfy the AND operator requirement. However, {C +& +W +Fencing} shows result because the records recalled are a combination of relevance search result (empty) and suggestion cache. Suggestion is based on different mechanisms thus behaves differently, this is a scenario that demonstrates why we leverage it as an advantage to improve recall rate.

Example 2 {C +& +W Fencing} and {C +& +W +Fencing} behaves differently because ACS recall behaves differently. In other words, {###ByPassRankers=True###C +& +W Fencing} and {###ByPassRankers=True###C +& +W +Fencing} behaves differently where the later one returns more records that includes term "Fencing". BizQA later merge the ACS recall with suggestion results and then ranking to get final display that contains more target records. For example, the record "Emma C & W Fencing Ltd" is the one merged from ACS recall.