Welcome to the forum, Warmbells. We're glad you could join us.
I ran into the same problem with Atomz myself. I like their search engine, but their page limit is pretty small for the free version and the pay version is literally thousands of dollars!
To answer your question about phpdig searches, they are case insensitive. Both littleborough and Littleborough will be found by searches if those words are in your index.
Good luck with your installation and setup of phpdig. If you have any other questions, don't hesitate to ask.