This must be a recent change? It's been driving me nuts lately. I have to resort to adding a lot of negated search terms to compensate but it's still sub optimal.
No, this has been the case for a long time, years anyway. I don't know if it goes back quite as far as when they removed the '+' operator tho.
But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"
I think it’s primarily for people copying and pasting something like an error message, which may have user-specific data in quotes. That should be what “not many results for...” is for, but Google is always trying to optimize away those clicks. Maybe they could add a “programatic” search feature with documented syntax for power users.
I am always surprised that these systems are not more friendly to engineers, since they were built by them. You'd think for their own sakes they'd stick in a system like xkcd.com/806/
Use 'verbatim'. It's a drop down option, and it isn't as good as the old + or other operators (deprecated because of Google Plus). For example, with verbatim you can't only + one single thing in a search.
Regardless, I basically just always search with verbatim on. Google is mostly useless otherwise.
But bejesus, this drives me nuts! If I know the double quotes function even exists, then Google should know I actually want to use it as intended - it shouldn't decide "yeah, but maybe you'd like these irrelevant results too!"