The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results,

The second one gets little attention but it’s infuriating to me. I mean, I’m explicitly telling the engine what I want. If it’s not including it in the results, I might as well not even be here typing. This is symptomatic of the fact that the users are not Google's customers. Google search is intended to direct you to the pages which are most profitable to the company. If you happen to find what you're looking for, so be it. If you don't find what you're looking for (because it's obscure and unprofitable) and instead get distracted by something Google would prefer you to see (because it's profitable) then all the better. The fact that you're a power user puts you in the minority of (likely unprofitable) users anyway, so Google doesn't mind inconveniencing you. They seem to have a pretty fierce anti-power-user culture, as evidenced by all of the (power user/ hacker popular) products and features they've killed over the years. We've got a lot of work to do if we're ever going to bring back the web we all remember from the old days.