Search only on User profile properties

Question

I created a custom people search, with custom user profile properties. Everything works OK in the search unless it sometimes shows a "wrong" result.
When I search "John", I also get other users who don't have any user profile properties that contain John. (for example Ruben)

I guess that has to do with the search itself (phonetic search, documents they worked on together,...)

So is it possible to let my people search ONLY search in the user profile properties?

--- Update ---
Is it possible I need to change the xml/xsl in
Central Administration > Manage service applications > Search Service Application > Federated Locations > Federated Locations > Edit location > Display Information

Answer 1

I was almost correct in the update above...

First go to:

Central Administration > Manage service applications > Search Service Application > Federated Locations > Federated Locations > Edit location > Location Information > Query Template

And add all the properties you want to search on after the value {searchTerms}. In my case this was:

{searchTerms} AND (FirstName:{searchTerms} OR LastName:{searchTerms} OR Initials:{searchTerms} OR Company:{searchTerms} OR Department:{searchTerms})

Answer 2

There are fundamentally two sides to search. You have the content search delivered by the search core results web part and then the people search core results web part. The result objects/definition are fundamentally different in that people search returns user profiles instead of content.

If you are doing this is in custom code you will need to set the scope property to the "people" scope in order to search only those objects.

Getting to the heart of your question about how to do a query that can get specific. You need to do a property search such as FirstName:"John" so that it will search against a specific property and not a full text search against the entire record where it could pick up things in the other properties including their manager's name.