diff -u b/core/modules/search/lib/Drupal/search/SearchQuery.php b/core/modules/search/lib/Drupal/search/SearchQuery.php
--- b/core/modules/search/lib/Drupal/search/SearchQuery.php
+++ b/core/modules/search/lib/Drupal/search/SearchQuery.php
@@ -18,6 +18,11 @@
  * This query is used by search plugins that use the search index (not all
  * search plugins do, as some use a different searching mechanism).
  *
+ * For efficiency, users of this query can run the prepareAndNormalize()
+ * method to figure out if there are any search results, before fully setting
+ * up and calling execute() to execute the query. The scoring expressions are
+ * not needed until the execute() step.
+ *
  * The query object is given the tag 'search_$type' and can be further
  * extended with hook_query_alter().
  */
only in patch2:
unchanged:
--- a/core/modules/node/lib/Drupal/node/Plugin/Search/NodeSearch.php
+++ b/core/modules/node/lib/Drupal/node/Plugin/Search/NodeSearch.php
@@ -209,8 +209,8 @@ public function execute() {
         }
       }
     }
-    // Only continue if the first pass query matches.
-    if (!$query->executeFirstPass()) {
+    // Only continue if the normalize query finds some results.
+    if (!$query->prepareAndNormalize()) {
       return array();
     }