[zo1]

Okay, I had this issue today and looked it up. Sure enough the term I had to quote and add a plus sign infront of was in the linked page after clicking through.

But that's it, it was just "there" near the bottom. They put in all this fancy AI understanding and ML and NLP effort but when I go out of my way to tell the search that "this word right here is super important and critical", they just go ahead and append "page.includes(word)" as a filter to their super algorithm. Instead of using that signal to drive the search. No better than when sites used to stuff their html pages with keywords to trick search engines.

#grumpy

[Ivoirians]

The problem would be that you probably wouldn't want to exclude the page from the results in case people expect to find it. Did the page get ranked above other more relevant pages that had the quoted term more prominently? If it did, you're right, that should probably be a stronger signal.