Google no longer (hasn't in a while) respected quotes. It's very hard to get Google to actually say there aren't any results even when in fact there are no matching results.
They respect it when they submit it then, as every time I've used that function to see them update the query with quotes it comes back with different results. I've never cared to look at the search query in the URL, so maybe they also add and additional parameter that tells the back end specifically to obey the quotes on this resubmitting???? So at some point, the quotes aren't ignored