You should be able to do an exact match search here. Trying to use double quotes on my name turns up a boatload of hits, but most of them appear to be cases where my first name is found somewhere on the page, and somewhere else my last name is found somewhere on the page.
It should also be possible to limit the search by city, state, and or region, as well as by timeframe.
Also, to limit by other qualifiers you can add those to the search criteria. However, the search isn't field-specific and so that ability can be done loose-ly (like Google) and not in a strict field-by-field sense. It's difficult and time consuming, but something that could improve the search.
How are exact match searches supported? There is absolutely no evidence on the page that this is possible.
How does searching for “brad knowles” match “brad alan knowles”, when I put my name in quotes? How does it match a case where “brad knowles” does not appear to be used anywhere on the page, but where one line matches “knowles” and then another line matches “brad”?
"brad knowles" - 14 results returned. The exact phrase is found in each.
brad knowles - 1925 results returned, which include results with brad and knowles in the text, where close proximity cases are ranked higher. Results with brad and knowles further apart will be ranked toward the bottom.
When you use quotes above, I'm not sure if that means what's in quotes above is what you searched or that you searched with quotes, but based on these checks and what I see, exact match searches as well as weighting without use of exact match quotes is working correctly.
I've found other cases where most of the hits shown on the screen are for one word or the other, but not both together. There is at least one hit on each of those cases where the two words are properly found side by side and in the correct order, and so it is technically a hit for the search. But the display is not correct, because on displaying the article it is showing each word hit individually from the others.
Using proper ASCII quotes to force an exact match instead of somehow getting smart quotes is definitely an improvement, but there's still more work to be done here with regards to line breaks and display of hits.
First, when I go to the website, whether it's the mobile version or the desktop version, the on-screen iPadOS keyboard is immediately hidden from me. I have no way to type anything into the website, unless I flip out the physical keyboard that just happens to be attached to this case. I have never seen that kind of behaviour before on any other website, ever.
Second, Apple does not make it easy to figure out where the "turn off smart quotes" option is located. I think I turned it off under the switch for Settings > General > Keyboard > Smart Punctuation but I'm not 100% certain. Nevertheless, this is the first case where I recall using quotes where they were not honored as I would have expected. I'm not sure where the blame lies on this -- is it a user expectation problem, an iPadOS problem, or a website problem?
I'll try again, this time trying to make sure I use the proper type of quotes.
It should also be possible to limit the search by city, state, and or region, as well as by timeframe.
Not very useful.