tweaking little stuff

I have no php skills, but have cobbled together a private WordPress site which remote staff use to download documents and keep a simple calendar. Since I am the only poster, and my “blog” entries consist of a short message with a link to the document, I have suppressed the author, comment and editing links on each message, and only the posting date appears. I use both the keyword search widget and the category search widget. For some reason, when searching by category, the post dates appear in all the entries on the results page. However, the results of the keyword search do NOT show the posting date, which is a real problem. Which file do I edit to fix this, and what exactly do I edit.

Another problem I have is with two extra pages I added – a colon appears after the title in the browser title bar and tab. How do I get rid of that?

I would also like to edit the title of my my main page – the page tab within WordPress says “Home” which is fine, but the browser tab shows the complete URL for the page (which of course doesn’t fit), while nothing appears in the browser’s top title bar (i.e., next to the program name). My other two page names appear in both the browsers tab, and the top title bar, not sure why they are different.

Let me say again that I have no knowledge of php (though I have basic html skills), and the arcane structure of WordPress directories and subdirectories with extremely similar or identical names mystifies and irks me, so please couch your responses in the simplest possible language that tells me exactly what to do. Thank you!