I am slightly surprised that no one seems to have made a request for this. At least I couldn’t find anything.
Global multi-word search only gives results for whole words, not for word stems when using the default double quotes:
Markdown file with text foo bars will happen in them is found when the search term is "foo bars" but not when it is "foo bar".
This should be standard in any application. Even English has some conjugations but other languages abound in them.
One solution is to use the line search operator. It restricts matches to the same line. In your case line:(foo bar) should work.
Other search operators: Search - Obsidian Help
I agree that exact phrase search should work similarly as searching using one word. But I’m not sure if there are any implementations in other applications. For example Finder in mac has similar restriction.
Thanks for the input. Unfortunately, it is not my preference to use specific search operators, especially since you no longer have to type in content:, which is how I used to start a regex search (my preferred workaround for now).
From my recent experience with shell scripts, anything within double quotes are taken as exact literals, which should be used for searches as there is absolutely no ambivalent behavior arising out of it (I forget the computer term here).
With Obsidian being a backend for many people who convert to Word/Scrivener/etc. for further word processing, it is important to give words (conjugated or otherwise) the respect they deserve.
Unless this is implemented in the future, users may run the risk of creating multiple duplications given that searches don’t yield proper results. English users as well as users using their own native languages.
Not sure how Chinese ideograms are handled.