My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic sim

My understanding is that google went from a more traditional database style which supported such queries, to a newer "n-gram" index with a layer of semantic similarity. Notably, you can no longer put a sentence in quotes to only find pages that contain that exact phrase. Also, the order of words matters more now than it used to (where the old search engines treated a space as AND, so order was irrelevant outside of quotes)