In the past, Ask handled phrase searching differently from the other search engines. Several years ago, phrase searching just did not work all the time. More recently, if a phrase search would get in zero results, Ask would just display the results as if a non-phrase search had been requested. There would be a brief message at the top stating that there were no phrase matches, but it was easy to miss that message. As of today, searching for a phrase such as “american pugilistic association” gives an appropriate message of “Your search for “american pugilistic association” did not match with any Web results.”
Unfortunately, it is not yet perfect, in that of the several phrases I tested, they all worked except for one oddity. One search gave six results (plus ads) along with the cryptic message of “Showing results 1-6 of 0” even though there were not any exact phrase matches. Perhaps it was because it included the stopword ‘in’ even though other phrases with that word did work correctly.
