The opposite way, having more terms yield more result entries (OR being the default operator), makes it very difficult to get highly relevant results.

Anyway, the core message from me would be: I think the user’s are right – who cares for the system model?

It’s still interesting though…

Your explanation is the system model, mine is the user mental model. There is a mismatch, which was what is interesting.

The system wasn’t a public search engine with millions of results and they knew it. It had a reasonable set of results and it would have been possible to check throught the entire result set. More words >> fewer results!

I would think that people don’t necessary expect fewer results if they use more words in their search but better results further at the top of the result list. Like if I add the search term “Australia” to my search (which I actually do sometimes…), the total number of results might be higher than with just the single term, but to find what I’m looking for I’d only have to look at the first page. Now without the additional “Australia”, I probably would have to weed through a few result pages until I find what I was looking for (if I find it at all).

So what I really want to say is, that I think people actually get it right if they think more words provide less results – after all, who really looks at all these 267,385 results anyway? So it’s more like: more search terms provide less results that I have to weed through until I have found what I was looking for.

People have been spoilt by Google or conditioned by Google to think that search works in a particular way.

Often a user will say “I’ve searched for X, but I can’t find anything” or “I’ve searched for Y but I get too many results”. The problem is, lilke you say, they expect the search to be as smart as they are and know what they want (…because that’s how Google seems to work? I wonder how people think Google works?)