Steps to reproduce the issue

Case A

1. open a com_finder search page
2. search for two terms, first being a boolean, such as “not connected” (no quotes in actual search)

Case B

1. as above
2. put quotes around the Boolean term to escape it

Expected result

Case A : would expect all pages containing the words ‘not’ and ‘connected’
Alternate A: empty set.

Case B: would expect to avoid the alternate result from A and get the pages containing both ‘not’ and ‘connected’.

Actual result

Case A: got the alternate result. Suboptimal, but understandable.
Case B: got all the pages containing ‘not’, excluding the pages that also contain ‘connected’.

System information (as much as possible)

3.9.14 Joomla PHP 7.3

Additional comments

It looks like it’s successfully escaping the boolean during the search, but then reinstates it to exclude. It should maintain the escape or never allow it. The hybrid is too confusing to the user. A better approach might be to only take the Boolean meaning of the term if it’s in caps, let lowercase search for the term just like any other word.