How can I search an exact phrase with copernic?

I think the answer is that Copernic recognizes old fashioned dumb quotes, and when they're  typed in its search bar, but does not recognize smart quotes , like “ ”  copied from MS Office, or other word processors. So "  " but not   “ ”.   So "John Smith" returns 151 documents, but  “John Smith” gets me 5,566 docs, same as with no quotes at all or John AND Smith.

The best way forward may be submit a support ticket (https://copernicsearch.freshdesk.com/en/support/tickets/new).

How can we get Copernic's attention on this issue? A response would be nice, even if it's to say they don't care and won't fix it. At least we'd know. 

I can't believe that a serious problem like this continues to exist. 

I have been having trouble with exact match for quite a while.  Sometimes it works, but it fails more often than it succeeds.

For example, I have a set of java files.  I am searching for the one that presents an error message.  I try to find a match and I receive a few hundred false positives.

I select the "system folder" which is the root of the directory containing the files.

I search for a simple string such as "asked to" and I get 198 hits.  So far I have not found a file that actually contains the string.  Is there some trick that will allow me to work around this problem?  It is one of the most important feature for me.

That's weird. I just searched for your phrase "lost will" and got 26,123 hits. From the results II opened three PDFs  at random, and got no hit for the phrase when I searched inside. I renamed one of the files to *.txt and searched that as text and also got not hits.

If I search for "lost" alone (with quotes) I get the 26,123 hits, as before. I search for "lost" (but without quotes) I get 26,278 hits. I don't understand why there is a difference. And if I search for "will" (with quotes and without quotes) I get zero hits, since apparently it is an unindexed short common word.

On the other hand, "hard choice" gives 12 hits; "hard" gives 29,309 hits;  and "choice" gives 19,282 hits.

So there is something particular to the "lost will" phrase that you used. Maybe Copernic needs to flag search phrases that contain unindexed words, when a search is attempted with them, and ask for the search to be redone with a different word or phrase.

I just searched for "lost will" and came up with 6,882 documents. This sucks. It used to work just fine. 

That makes sense Larry. However in my case the search for the sought string gives a useless result  due to a vast number of 'false positives', many many times the expected number of hits among MAIL. But the hits among files is relevant and expected. Obviously there seems to be a difference in either indexing or search between files and mail.

I can't find the file describing how this works, but to the best of my recollection CDS ignores all punctuation and space character both when indexing and when doing a search, and is case insensitive.

 Indeed. My problem seems to be related to search among indexed Outlook emails (from several different accounts). Search for the phrase "H4" or "H4 " gives exactly the same number of hits. The hits of FILES are relevant and as expected but the mail hits does not make sense even though I can find the expected hits within the hit result.

It works for me.   But I'm searching only in documents (my email program, TheBat!, is not supported in CDS). So is problem you are describing limited only to search results for emails?

I'm sorry but I have the exact same question and the answer given is no solution.
Being an Copernic DTS user since many years I now note that enclosing a string in quotation marks, like "H4 ", in my case does note get the expected precise hits. In fact 12501 e-mail hits instead of expected handful.
I think this essential search ability has been broken... Please fix Copernic!

Put the search term in quotes, to search for the exact phrase. If the phrase is not in quotes CDS will search for all of the words in the phrase.

You may also find this list useful for other kinds of searches:

https://copernicsearch.freshdesk.com/en/support/solutions/articles/47001112953-refine-search-with-search-operators