I've found that double-quotes are basically mandatory in any search now. (this is Google shorthand for "results MUST include this term", you probably know that.)
I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI, and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.
This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web.
About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that. I think we discount how much the rise of search engines as a discovery mechanism hurt the original PageRank algorithm. Things used to be easy to search for because humans were self-categorizing all the knowledge available (because we didn't have good search engines), and PageRank just made that self-categorization globally available.
Now there's so much more noise on the web, and no one is manually organizing it like we did with the old "web rings", and that's not even beginning to explore the issue of sites manually gaming SEO. The algorithm's job is much harder today, and so we need to give it a little help finding what we want.
> This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web.
> About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, ...
I remember double quotes being infinitely more useful 10 years ago than they are today and much more strict (i.e. good for technical searches). You could put actual code syntax into double quotes and it would return meaningful results containing that syntax. Nowadays there is no way I'm aware of to force google to respect every single character within double quotes — it's much more fuzzy now and frequently characters like `!;.,/\|{}[]` are ignored/dropped from inside quotes and the quality of (technical) results suffers. It's the 80/20 optimization problem discussed elsewhere in this thread...
I might be looking for some sort of broad topic, like how do a I do a particular thing in SwiftUI, and it will return a bunch of stuff about SwiftUI that sort of skirts the topic. A search for do "a particular thing" "SwiftUI" is more likely to succeed.