I've noticed this as well, and I think it's because 1) technical queries have a different optimal algorithm than non-technical queries and 2) as Google's audien

I've noticed this as well, and I think it's because 1) technical queries have a different optimal algorithm than non-technical queries and 2) as Google's audience grows, the proportion of technical queries shrinks. For a technical query, you essentially want something like PageRank-weighted grep, which is, of course, what you used to get. All of the fancy NLP/fuzzy-matching stuff that Google has been adding recently, while helpful for all sorts of other things, is going to be a detriment for technical queries. When you're doing something like googling an error message or a code snippet, you're basically querying machine-generated speech, and much of Google's recent work has been on improving querys of human-generated speech. It seems like it should be simple to implement a little "technical query" checkbox...