my confusion i think stems from the fact that it looks like the results (with the star above) on the bottom happen when i was hitting the merge button (with two words in the box). when in fact the results are not the seemingly random one at the bottom.

yeah some of my (techy) friends didn't get that you should just type in a single word.

simple solution to this would be gray text in the empty field: "type a word" or something like that.