"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.
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.