Sometimes you want to search for a string of words instead of a single word, e.g. meat quality or food quality management. This is called phrase searching.
Phrase searching allows you to combine words so that you only get records where the words are next to each other in the order specified. For example, if you were looking for records about meat quality you would get less, but more precise results by using the phrase meat quality than by using meat AND quality.
Some databases assume that words typed next to each other should be searched as phrases. Other databases automatically put a Boolean AND between your search terms, requiring that they both be present but not necessarily adjacent to each other. When you search a database for the first time it is a good idea to determine whether the default setting is a phrase search or not.
When the default setting of a database is not a phrase search, you are still able to search for an exact combination of words. Using double quotes " " around search words is a common way to do phrase searching, e.g. "food quality management".