I am super annoyed by the forum search function. I have no idea how to find out what the operators are. It does not follow Google conventions. What am I missing?

From what I can tell, it just always defaults to OR. So when I search for

Impossible Arlen

It returns all the instances of posts with the word impossible OR the word alren. (And the song was not there, although I probably missed it it in the large mass of answers, even limiting the search to the Jazz forum.)

I tried using quotes to enact an exact phrase and that had no effect.

I tried using operators in capital letters (AND) and that had no effect.

It always searches using the OR operator.

I tried to search this forum for
Search
to find answers to this question and the search said it found too many responses to list. So I could not even search this forum for specifics. This happens FREQUENTLY.

I also noticed that the results change dramatically depending on if you add a space after your search term, especially with composers since people sometimes use a dash with no spaces (which means searching for one composer with a space at the end will not produce all hits since there is no functioning WILD CARD operator, typically *. So you have to do two searches, one with a space at the end and another without, but you will still miss any posts where the author did not put spaces between multiple composers.)

So I am asking:
What are the standard operators to search the forums?
Is there a "wild card" operator?

And YES I read all the "how to search" posts but was not able to find this specific information.

Can anyone help?!?

Scichick