You have to realise you're in a minority there – at least, I think that's the case. I expect most search engine users (i.e. non-tech-industry users) are intere

You have to realise you're in a minority there – at least, I think that's the case. I expect most search engine users (i.e. non-tech-industry users) are interested in 'typing things into the internet to find stuff'. The ability to build a useful search query isn't something a lot of people can do – it's dependent on understanding concepts like verbatim strings, quotes, modifiers… not that complex, but equally not common knowledge. Instead, Google is going to use the vast resources at it's disposal to guess the intent of badly-worded queries, and unfortunately that's not going to benefit people who can word their queries well. Here's a tip though – I've configured my browser to search using Google's 'verbatim' search mode by default. It's not perfect, but it's much closer to how it used to operate. Unfortunately, as much as I'd like to try using another search engine, they've been much less useful in practice.