I am trying to get the Title property indexed as a crawled property, and then merged into the Title managed property - though I can't seem to find it as a choice in the crawled properties. I searched for all properties that contain title, and enabled all of them to be included in the search index, performed a full crawl, but none of them contain the title for the document I uploaded and gave a title to.
I can see the title being indexed for Web Pages, and if I embed a specific title in an office document, SharePoint will pull that into a different crawled property... but I can't seem to get the generic Title property from a generic document library to be included in the index.
Update: I have this partially working now. It turns out the document I was using to test with has something strange in the title (or some strange limitation on the Title property):
Title that doesn't work: System Engineering Life Extension (SELE) Engineering Operations Presentation Series -- A Whirlwind tour
Shorter title that does work: System Engineering Life Extension (SELE) -- A Whirlwind tour
Update 2: Some preliminary testing seems to indicate that the title property only indexes up to the first 64 characters.
Turns out that this behavior is deemed "by-design" according to the SharePoint team. Microsoft Premier Support informed me of this after digging into the issue a little deeper, and I requested the publish a knowledge base article or a similar technet article on the limitation as it is publicly documented anywhere. They also confirmed that this is "by-design" for the 2007 and 2010 versions of SharePoint.