I've marked this as a bug because it is a usability bug even though it might be by design. I tend to think it's possible, though, that it might have been unintentionally introduced in the revisions to the search module between 4.5 and 4.6.

Back in Drupal 4.5, entering and into the Drupal search engine returned the results of the boolean query

AND

I've just checked in 4.6 and CVS (the version I have installed is about a week old), and Drupal now does the following query instead for search results

OR

The problem is that an inclusive search means that it is not possible to limit very large search results by running additional queries with more terms. On the other hand, if the default on Drupal is to do AND operations, someone wanting to find the results of

OR

can simply do two different single queries for each term.

Note that there exists a support issue for this for 4.6.x that was never responded to.

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

I think you're right that this is a usability flaw. Google has established the dominant pattern:

vacation hawaii        the words vacation and Hawaii .
Maui OR Hawaii        either the word Maui or the word Hawaii
"To each his own"    the exact phrase to each his own
Steven’s picture

Steven commented
Status: Active » Fixed

HEAD search is AND by default but supports OR, exactly like Google does.

cel4145’s picture

cel4145 commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)