A much better experience, quotes appear to work. As for a page of white with search bar, I still get this with setting safe off, changing region appears to be fixed.
This is insecure code that is susceptible to SQL injection. Check out https://phptherightway.com/#databases and read the PDO section. It gives almost your exact code as an example of what not to do. Look at using PDO bound parameters. You never want to concat strings together to create sql. Especially with strings that come from untrusted sources.
Maybe you are using https://search.jojoyou.org/pri version? This version uses only own index and I haven't added there support for quotes yet.
In https://search.jojoyou.org/ quotes should work. (But I haven't done any changes to it yet)