How can this be under review for 6 years? Search is nearly as bad as the OCR. I use advanced and exact phrase, yet in the resulting images, every single word in that phrase is highlighted in the article individually.

4 years on the search still seems rather unsophisticated.

18 months on, and this is still as bad - especially the 'exact search on a phrase - which the search engine does not do.

An "exact" search needs to be just that. Searching for the surname 'Williams' should not bring results of the name 'William'!

The search terms 'all these words' or 'exact phrase' do not mean what they say - very frustrating - and should surely be 'possible' to include - particularly when the search ignores a 'significant' word such as 'and' (when in a phrase - if the search needed to look for A AND B then would be in the 'all these words', so when 'and' is within a phrase, it is a significant part of it).

Can we have an update on this please.

The search facility is user unfriendly. It compares most unfavourably with the (free) Australian equivalent http://trove.nla.gov.au/

An excellent idea!

This improvement cannot come soon enough. Nothing is more frustrating than searches which ignore the complete phrase.

Agreed. I have just searched for a particular term. The results that are blue boxed have nothing to do with this term. The London Standard seems extremely prone to this sort of error, making it totally useless.

Terribly disappointed that the Search function doesn't do this. Very poor effort and quite useless numbers of irrelevant hits are displayed.

you search for "john smith!