Search Results not displaying for multiple word search

Question

I've customized a theme and am having some problems with search results using multiple-word queries. Site is live at www.abetterworldbydesign.com

Searching for a single word works as expected.

Searching for multiple words that should have returned results shows blank results.

Oddly enough, manually changing the "+" character in the URL to "&" displays the results correctly but only shows the first word in the header "Search results for:_".

My code in search.php for initializing WP_Query follows exactly the code listed in the codex. Full code for search.php on pastebin.

Code for searchform.php below.

<form id="searchform" name="searchform" method="get" action="<?php echo home_url(); ?>">
    <div>
        <input type="text" id="s" name="s" />
        <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="<?php esc_attr_e( 'Search', 'richwp' ); ?>" />
    </div>
</form>

Answer 1

Answer from Richard M on the question originally asked on StackOverflow:

Replacing line 21 on search.php with $search_query[$query_split[0]] = urldecode($query_split[1]) resolved it.