[comex]

> Whatever the reason. It has changed recently and is annoying.

Fair enough. Like I said, it can certainly be improved, and perhaps recent changes have gone too far.

> Also you can't set the default search to verbatim. You can only hack the query parameters in specific browsers.

Don't the kind of people that frequent this site near universally use their browsers to search, rather than wasting keypresses navigating to google.com?

Ridiculously, Safari, which I use, requires an extension to use an arbitrary search engine, but I can't think of another browser that doesn't support it.