NYT article search API not returning results for certain queries - api

Question

I have a set of queries and I am trying to get web_urls using the NYT article search API. But I am seeing that it works for q2 below but not for q1.
q1: Seattle+Jacob Vigdor+the University of Washington
q2: Seattle+Jacob Vigdor+University of Washington
If you paste the url below with your API key in the web browser, you get an empty result.
Search request for q1
api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=Seattle+Jacob%20Vigdor+the%20University%20of%20Washington&begin_date=20170626&api-key=XXXX
Empty results for q1
{"response":{"meta":{"hits":0,"time":27,"offset":0},"docs":[]},"status":"OK","copyright":"Copyright (c) 2013 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved."}
Instead if you paste the following in your web browser (without the article 'the' in the query) you get non-empty results
Search request for q2
api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=Seattle+Jacob%20Vigdor+University%20of%20Washington&begin_date=20170626&api-key=XXXX
Non-empty results for q2
{"response":{"meta":{"hits":1,"time":22,"offset":0},"docs":[{"web_url":"https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/06/26/us/ap-us-seattle-minimum-wage.html","snippet":"Seattle's $15-an-hour minimum wage law has cost the city jobs, according to a study released Monday that contradicted another new study published last week....","lead_paragraph":"Seattle's $15-an-hour minimum wage law has cost the city jobs, according to a study released Monday that contradicted another new study published last week.","abstract":null,"print_page":null,"blog":[],"source":"AP","multimedia":[],"headline":{"main":"New Study of Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Says It Costs Jobs","print_headline":"New Study of Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Says It Costs Jobs"},"keywords":[],"pub_date":"2017-06-26T15:16:28+0000","document_type":"article","news_desk":"None","section_name":"U.S.","subsection_name":null,"byline":{"person":[],"original":"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS","organization":"THE ASSOCIATED PRESS"},"type_of_material":"News","_id":"5951255195d0e02550996fb3","word_count":643,"slideshow_credits":null}]},"status":"OK","copyright":"Copyright (c) 2013 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved."}
Interestingly, both queries work fine on the api test page
http://developer.nytimes.com/article_search_v2.json#/Console/
Also, if you look at the article below returned by q2, you see that the query term in q1, 'the University of Washington' does occur in it and it should have returned this article.
https://www.nytimes.com//aponline//2017//06//26//us//ap-us-seattle-minimum-wage.html
I am confused about this behaviour of the API. Any ideas what's going on? Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Thank you for all the answers. Below I am pasting the answer I received from NYT developers.
NYT's Article Search API uses Elasticsearch. There are lots of docs online about the query syntax of Elasticsearch (it is based on Lucene).
https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-query-string-query.html#query-string-syntax
If you want articles that contain "Seattle", "Jacob Vigdor" and "University of Washington", do
"Seattle" AND "Jacob Vigdor" AND "University of Washington"
or
+"Seattle" +"Jacob Vigdor" +"University of Washington"

Answer 2

I think you need to change encoding of spaces (%20) to + (%2B):
In your example,
q=Seattle+Jacob%20Vigdor+the%20University%20of%20Washington
When I submit from the page on the site, it uses %2B:
q=Seattle%2BJacob+Vigdor%2Bthe+University+of+Washington
How are you URL encoding? One way to fix it would be to replace your spaces with + before URL encoding.
Also, you may need to replace %20 with +. There are various schemes for URL encoding, so the best way would depend on how you are doing it.