How do I treat the phrase as individual words in Search?
When adding text fields to your search index, you need to indicate it's usage by specifying if you want it to be a Fulltext field or a String field.



You can add the field twice, once a String and once as a Fulltext field.

If you are using views, you'll want to make sure your full text search exposed filter includes the Fulltext version of this field, and is set to "Contains any of these words"