This post was stimulated by the appearance on Canadiana Héritage of 28 digital microfilms of indexes and registers of Orders-in-Council, from Confederation in 1867 to 1930. They are LAC microfilms C-2075 to C-2093, and C-4801 to C-4809. Information on the context is incomplete so I set about finding more about them and stumbled into something unexpected using LAC’s Collection Search.
For searches including quotes the counts, each of which is preceeded by >, for what one might think would be the same search are different depending on whether words are capitalize and hyphens are included.
Searching for the phrase with hyphens and without quotes gives the same results no matter the capitalization. But there is no consistancy with the results in the bar chart.
Most searches will include additional terms, like a name. There will be fewer results to wrestle with. If you don’t find what you expect try variations, especially if using phrases in quotes.