[guycook]

I know exactly what you mean. "Half" "of" "my" "searches" "look" "like" "this" "these" "days". I can understand throwing out one of many keywords when I'm down on page 6, but when I search with only 4 terms and the very first result has 2 words s̶t̶r̶u̶c̶k̶ o̶u̶t̶ I start to wonder who exactly this search box is for.

[mojuba]

True, and one other thing I've noticed is e.g. "Half of my searches" can bring say 200,000 results, but "Half of my" yields 50,000. A few other weird things that's been there for years and nobody seems to care. As long as consumer-level searches work and ads are clickable, Google's clock is ticking.

[gniv]

I wouldn't put too much stock on those numbers. They are probably statistical estimates, not actual counts.

[lobster_johnson]

Under "Search tools", click on "Verbatim". It will cause the query to actually honor the words you typed.

[swang]

does this honor typos? i like spellcorrect changes but i hate all the other assumptions they make about my search terms.

[lobster_johnson]

It will show a "Did you mean:", but doesn't automatically rewrite it. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gam+of+throes&tbs=li:1