Have you tried "Contains all of these words" instead of "Exact Phrase Match"?
I just got the search engine (here on the Forum) to finds this thread and I intentionally did not capitalize "Search" and added some stray spaces and got this to thread to come up. (I searched on "search engine pits")
It might help if you say what you are looking for. Maybe the thread got zapped and really doesn't exist anymore.
-Dave