I’m embarrassed. You’re right. I just had a coincidence that the patterns I tested were the most recent files, and I sort by modified time. Sorry folks!
EDITED MY POST: I think I might be wrong. After more testing, I think I get what you were originally saying @Calion apologies for not getting it right away. I was too focused on the syntax.
There is this old thread about sorting relevancy. Sort search results by relevance (and what relevance is)
But now I see that it IS nearly impossible to search for a note that contains 3 separate words, and only if it contains those 3 words. Quotes only works if the phrase is contiguous. That isn’t about relevancy. It’s difficult just to filter out things.
I’ve been testing Omnisearch to see if it helps, but for example, if I search “rare” and other terms, I get a lot of results for “are”. But the description says it has smarter weighting. So I’m going to spend some time experimenting with the plugin’s settings. It has a lot of options. There may be other search plugins too.