Phrase search enables users to enter queries for text matching of an ordered sequence of one or more specific words.

By default, an MDEX Engine search query matches any text containing all of the search terms entered by the user. Order and location of the search words in the matching text is not considered. For example, a search for John Smith returns matches against text containing the string John Smith and also against text containing the string Jane Smith and John Doe.

In some cases, the user may want location and order to be considered when matching searches. If one were searching for documents written by John Smith, one would want hits containing the text John Smith in the author field, but not results containing Jane Smith and John Doe.

Phrase search enables the user to put double-quote characters around the search term, thus specifying a literal string to be searched. Results of a phrase search contain all of the words specified in the user’s search (not stemming, spelling, or thesaurus equivalents) in the exact order specified.

For example, if the user enters the phrase query "run fast", the search finds text containing the string run fast, but not text containing strings such as fast run, run very fast, or running fast, which might be returned by a normal non-phrase query.

Additionally, phase search queries do not ignore stop words. For example, if the word the is configured as a stop word, a phrase search for "the car" does not return results containing simply car (not preceded by the).

Also, phrase search permits stop words to be disabled. For example, if the is a stop word, a phrase search for "the" can retrieve text containing the word the.

Because phrase searches only consider exact matches for contained words, phrase search also provides a means to return only true matches for a particular word, avoiding matches due to features such as stemming, thesaurus, and spelling.

For example, a normal search for the word corkscrew might also return results containing the text corkscrews or wine opener. Performing a phrase search for the word “corkscrew” only returns results containing the word corkscrew verbatim.