I found the correct piece of code & made the change, but it doesn't appear to have changed anything... ideas?

Thanks for he update on this one, Beat.
At least in future versions we will have the possibility to choose an operator.

I understand that = is more tender on the DB, specially if it is really big. However, it is quite useless in "real life" scenarios, in the sense that almost no one will hit exact matches from a free search box (many people hardly know how to actually use a search engine).

Nuno.