Well it works like that.. It's how the search engine works, it detect the words you type and find beatmaps that have source/tags/name that is the same as the word you type

if using quotes doesn't work here, then no, there's no alternative method

Nope i guess

You can use "Genre" and "Language" options if you know about the artist that you look for. It helps a lot.

genre as it pertains to osu! is kind of...unique, though. You have to know how osu! would classify something

This has always bugged me, but not enough that I actually feel the need to complain about it. More words should mean less results, but what I do is just search for the least common word in the title or (usually) the artist. I don't think genre would help much because it's likely that you're looking for a Japanese song and those genres are just huge.

the tag function that we have on maps is broad enough to make searching quite a pain at times.