> lowercase Boolean operators

I would not want to activate that if it was an option.

I’ve recently been troubleshooting an issue with search results on a provider platform which reminded me of this submission.
I already had concerns with it in anticipating it causing search return problems in Primo, but this analysis I conducted on the other platform solidified the issue in my mind, and I thought it useful to share here as to why I would not support this submission.

The article in question:
How to make sure you’re not using data just to justify decisions you’ve already made

This issue was that results for an exact title match were not returning the known item, unless entered with quotation marks.
I noticed that in the results which were returned, the term highlighting for matches to the search query stopped after “you’re” even though “not” also matches the query.
Given “not” is a known Boolean operator, I suspected that there might be an issue where it’s being treated incorrectly to tell the search engine to not return results.
Hence Boolean operators in capitals typically to avoid this problem. And this is the case for Primo with NOT, AND, OR.
Adding quotation marks worked to return the known item though because they force an exact phrase match, as opposed to Boolean behaviour, and overrides the defect for “not” being treated as Boolean.
And sure enough with some iterative testing it is found that skipping the word “not” when not using quotation marks resulted in the desired article being returned.

• Query: How to make sure you’re not using data just to justify decisions you’ve already made – Results: 22 results and the desired article is not among them, despite being an exact match
• Query: How to make sure – Results: 783 results and the desired article is not in the first 50, but presumably it is in the results set somewhere
• Query: How to make sure you’re – Results: 27 results and the desired article is No.6
• Query: How to make sure you’re not – Results: Same as directly above, with 27 results and the desired article is No.6
• Query: How to make sure you’re not using – Results: 22 results, and the desired article is missing (repeat for additional words added). Assumption here being that the desired article is not returned because the “not” tells the search engine that the results need to contain “How to make sure you’re” but NOT include “using”
• Query: “How to make sure” – Results: 388 results and the desired article is not in the first 50, but presumably it is in the results set somewhere
• Query: “How to make sure you’re” – Results: 23 results and the desired article is No.5
• Query: “How to make sure you’re not using” – Results: 5 results and they are all the desired article. Assumption here being that quotation marks are overriding Boolean to force an exact phrase query
• Query: How to make sure you’re using – Results: 5 results and they are all the desired article