Use word boundary regex matches

How do you search for a word?

• "word" will also match "swordsmanship"
• " word " will miss "word: "
• etc.

The answer is simple: word boundaries.

In PCRE (which is a very widely used regex engine, you are likely using this) you can do \bword\b, or in Vim's regex engine you can do \<word\> and it does exactly what you want.