Are there certain search booleans I should be aware of?

As far as I remember search currently splits search phrases into words by characters like ., and probably @. Even worse it doesn't use boolean "and" to search for all words but uses boolean "or". Thus the search results are very often not what one might expect.
The search problems of 1PW8 are known for almost two years...
1PW7's far better search does not have this kind of problem.