People Search: Odd results (SP2010), What do you think?

Question

This doesn't seem right and I'm wondering if this is how it works for everyone or if I have an issue I need to resolve.

Context: Enterprise Search Center, SP 2010, total number of profiles is 450.

Consider the following inputs vs results.

Last name of a profile:  Cravet
Search input: Crave
Result count: ZERO! 
Input: crav 
Result count: 1 (and it's spurious)

Last name: Smith
Input: smi
Result count: 1 spurious hit (name "Records Center C")?!
Input: smit 
Result: all the Smiths 

Enabling/disabling Stemming makes no difference, the results are always the same.

Other than adding a Search Summary webpart, how can I improve the results?

Ideally, I'd like matches from 2 characters -- input of 'sm' should yield all the smiths plus all others with sm in either the first or last name.

Thanks

Answer 1

Speach server runtime can give you improved suggestions (see article http://mrhodes.net/2011/02/08/enabling-fuzzy-search-for-sharepoint-server-2010/)

What language are you running search on? The behaviour could be explained by that the words are noise words (like The, this, his etc)

Read about noise words and stop files here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd361733.aspx