Thread:Help talk:CirrusSearch/How the search API for media wiki works?/reply (3)

Using a default "OR" conjunction is fairly common to the point of being nearly universal in web based consumer facing search. This choice is typically based on the assumptions that the scoring model will surface better matches near the head of the result list and that showing more results is preferred to showing fewer. A Google search for example follows the same behavior.

Google however also has a very large corpus of hinting that helps them understand that "Taj Mahal" is a phrase even though it was entered without explicit phrase quoting. You can see the results of this type of change on CirrusSearch from the default 'Taj OR Mahal OR Agra' parsing by entering instead '"Taj Mahal" Agra'. This change also brings Taj Mahal to the top of the results list in the same way that using and explicit AND conjunction does. Interestingly, in this case Taj Mahal is the first result if Agra is dropped from the query entirely. This is likely due to the increased sorting boost given to title matches.