Search phrases rely on minimum character count to provide results

Sorry about he title and I don't know if this is a bug or a feature. The issue is that if the search index is set to index a minimum of 3 characters, then a search for, play it safe or "play it safe" won't return results. Disabling custom search and performing the same search using core search form provides accurate search results. When I set the search index to index a minimum of 2 characters and the re-eenable custom search, I get accurate search results. Other than core search and custom search, I'm also using the Porter-Stemmer module. I would expect that the search would ignore the 2 letter characters and still search for both of the longer search terms.