Putting a word in quotes achieves the same effect nowadays

There seem to be a lot of cases where no amount of quote marks will convince them to not match similar words, giving me 5,000,000 results of garbage and none of useful content. Ironically, I suspect some of the things I search were deliberately written with unusual language SO they'd be able to easily searched later.

Also, I've found more and more frequently I get the "there aren't any great results" response from them lately, complete with condescending "maybe search for 'cake recipes' instead" explanation box. Honestly, I'd think if you can find things that they know have few/no results, they should be trying to gain direct feedback-- why are you searching for this, and what could help improve results?

It feels like the dominant market players want to create an illusion of endless depth, and any time where you can actually reach the bottom of the barrel is an embarrassment. So you've got Google chastising you for stumping them, and Amazon giving you 98 unrelated garbage results when there are really only two widgets you actually care about in stock.

No, not for many of us at least.

Has't worked reliably for me and a number of others for close to a decade I think (the first blog post I know of that mention it is from 2011 or 2013 I think.)

Oh, and I think it is the same thing as others mention in this discussion: infantilization and "we know better than you".

But being Google it might also be just general lack of care.

i believe there's a setting somewhere to enable verbatim search, but yeah google has steadily been getting worse

I need to confirm this, but it looks like they're adding a 5-second delay to the server response time if the User-Agent is a browser they don't like. (Changed the user-agent to Firefox and the delay immediately went away.)

I have known about that for about as long as I've had this problem and I think it used to work back then but today I consider it a purely decorative element.