What is Exact Phrase Search?
Exact phrase search refers to the ability of searching for an exact phrase, verbatim, including space characters, in a search engine. Most search engines do not perform exact phrase search by default, requiring some sort of setting or search operator to activate it.
For example, on Google, searching for cats and dogs will include in the results all webpages that have the word cat or cats, and dog or dogs, and Google most likely will ignore the word and because it's too common (words ignored in this way by search engines are called stop words). In order to activate the exact phrase search, the "double quotes" search operator is used, e.g. "cats and dogs" will search webpages that contain this exact phrase, the words in this exact order, including the spaces.
Search Operator
Most search engines use double quotes (") to activate exact phrase search.
In some cases, a word can be searched for exactly by prefixing it with a plus (+) sign instead.