This idea sounds great, although I'd like to be able to search on both last name and first name. I don't think that this would be too difficult to do, effectively any comma in a name adds a second search term. This certainly is more workable than the concept of trying to match any substring within a name.

Maybe a better concept would be to use parenthesis so "The Doors" becomes "(The) Doors", which would indicate that "Doors" is the sort term.

The only issue would be that the tweak order code might also have to be modified? I imagine that the search parameters are tied in somehow. I don't know.

I recently read another thread about searching for 'Live' albums - the user wanted to be able to effectively search for the occurance of 'Live' in the whole album title.
I wonder if this idea could be used there too, so "The Doors Live" becomes "(The) Doors (Live)", so "Doors" remains the sort term, but "The" and "Live" both end up as search terms.

Of course, escaping might have to be dealt with, similar to the "Joe, Bob, and the Family" issue in using commas.