Oh, I see why you were getting a different number of results.  If you read the very start of my statement of the issue you will see i was searching in the category Books only.Now that you've clarified that search was to be title only, to address the issue of keyword spamming, then okay I'm fine with that. I needed the booleans to work on the item description too to get rid of stuff I didn't want.Perhaps what is needed is to clarify the behaviours in the help section.

I was not adding quotes so it should not decide to start searching the description.  but it does when there is the boolean.Yes, as I said above "obviously with the quotes the NOT would be treated as part of a string and not a logical operator."   NOT/AND being a boolean logical operator.

So yes, obviously with the quotes the NOT would be treated as part of a string and not a logical operator.If I add NOT I should get less results, not 20 times the number of results.The help page says it is to exclude results: "iPod NOT shuffle will give you results for iPods but exclude references to shuffle".So my guess is that "surrealism" is returning results only with that in the ad title, and the NOT seems to make it now include results where the term is in the description.

I get zero results with " "surrealism NOT 9783791378145" " and 403 results without the quotes. How many do you get?   Something is wrong with this site if things aren't reproducible if you're using normal logic...

Was it really too much effort to spend a few seconds to try it yourself? You probably spent more effort doing the reply. It is quite obvious what I was doing - I said how many results I get. Do you not get the same number of results?