Wouldn’t a single character search literally just pull up every single instance that character was used?
Correct. The search query finds all instances of the string, whether it's part of another word or not. So searching for {2 lane roads} would pull up every post with "lane" and "roads"
and...
* "2" in the topic number
* "2" in the message number
* "2" in the time stamp
* "2" anywhere in post, including topic number, message number, or time stamp of any quoted material.
I think you can see why that would be an undesirable feature.
