That’s because it’s been progressively getting worse for years. For example, when they launched Google+ they stopped supporting the + operator in favour of “quotes” and people complained about that. Of course now the “quotes” don’t work either.
Google used to be amazing. If you remembered a set of words that were on a page, you could enter those words and it would find matching pages. It’s been broken for years and keeps getting more broken.
Yes it's broken, try searching 'python abs "Return the absolute value of a number"'. That string is directly lifted from the Python docs for the `abs` function. The official Python documentation does not appear for me until the 3rd page and the "featured snippet" is from some random website called flexiple.com
Well that’s the problem then. You could say your problem has more to do with the relevancy of the results than the exact match operator (I personally don’t mind in this case since for the few times I’ve had to write python I’ve found the official docs not as useful as I’d expect).
As I said, I use that operator all the time and it works. I’d be the first to complain when it doesn’t. For instance, the - operator stopped working in YouTube a while ago, unfortunately.
Google used to be amazing. If you remembered a set of words that were on a page, you could enter those words and it would find matching pages. It’s been broken for years and keeps getting more broken.