Hello, PeeblesHistoricalArchive
To investigate this at all, we will need a copy of your document, however, David is correct here, use of the "Edit content" tool will ensure there is not auto-grouping of the text content, what you see with that tool enabled is the actual "text-content blocks" as they exist in the structure of the document.
In a PDF there is no concept of paragraphs, even lines of text are questionable at best, sometimes a single letter may be one object other times, a whole word, sometimes the latter half of one word, the next 3 words, and the first letter of the 5th word can all be one object, meanwhile, each other letter in the first and 5th words could be a separate object on their own.
This is why automatically assuming these groupings is so important to the use of not only editing features, but also the search functions. As such, I am sorry to say it is simply not possible to disable this entirely, the best we can offer is the Advanced Search function (Ctrl_Shift_F) which allows you to specify the proximity to some degree.
With that said, the default value "adjacent words" should be the same as the find function; both use the same assumed "text-block" logic as the edit text tool does.
Kind regards,
