What I am trying to do is have search find any post that includes all of the search words, but as individual words, not as a phrase.

I don’t want it to treat the words as a phrase unless they are surrounded by quotes. Ivory search does accept quotes around search words and correctly searches for a phrase if the quotes are used. And it also correctly searches in the title and description for individual words if the quotes are not used.

But you are saying it doesn’t do this in tags. Even though no quotes are used around the words, it searches tags as if it is a phrase and only returns the post if there is a tag that exactly matches the search words in the exact same order. So AND has no real effect in the tags.

That isn’t what I expected and hence my confusion. Just as it AND’s or OR’s words and phrases in the title and description, I thought it would do the same in tags and AND or OR tags together.

This is a problem as there is no way then to have it return a post if the individual words entered in the search, without quotes, are only in the tags as separate tags. They would have to be in tags as a single tag that exactly matches the search word for word in the same order. Like a phrase.

Is there anyway to have it return a post if the search is for say 3 words, without quotes, so it’s not a phrase, and the words are in separate tags?

Hi Vinod
The Visibility option is part of Jetpack.
I thought you may be able to help because the plugin allows me to have multiple search forms. I have 2 search forms that are shown on different areas of the site. But they seem to use the same results page. Because of that I reasoned that there must be some way to control which widget appears on the search results page. Otherwise all the search widgets will appear there together.
I am assuming that having multiple search forms was intended to be used in this way – having different search forms for different parts of a website.
Forgetting the Jetpack Visibility options, how would you control which search form appears when results are shown? Shouldn’t it be the search form that was used to perform the search, and only that one?

Vinod, I need to explain further.
I have added 2 Ivory Search widgets to the same widget area. 1 widget uses the Blog search form, the other widget uses the Page search form.

I have the right search page appear on the blog pages I use the Visibility option for the widget to show it only on the blog pages.
I do a similar think to have the page search form appear only on pages.

But if I use the Visibility option to shows the widgets on the ‘Searcg results’ page then they both appear.

How do I make it so if someone uses the blog search, when the results page appears then only the blog search page is visible?

That plugin really did some strange stuff. A lot of admin options disappeared, my site reverted back to a template no longer installed that I used years ago. Very strange.

I did disable plugins but still didn’t work correctly.

I changed themes as you asked and it still doesn’t work.

Only problem now is all the widgets in my footer have been removed when I changed back. Before anything else I now have to try to remember what was there and restore it.