To be even more frank, Google's search capabilities diminished around late 2000s early 2010s for me. I used to be able to write out anything verbatim and find it. Now I can't even get the double quotes trick to work properly. Google's strengths have been slowly crippled for years.
Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.
I don't know if it still works, but plus triple double quotes used to work as a verbatim match. Iirc I picked it up here when they broke double quote search a while back (which they fixed at some point).
A tip I saw here a couple of weeks ago that restored some quality to searches was to, after searching, open the drop-down menu from “Tools”, select “all results” and then “verbatim”.
I do all of my searches in incognito so sadly I don’t know if the options is remembered or not.
Huh, I didn't know that. I now use a meta engine, so I don't really keep up with Google dorking, but that is good to know for the few times I fall back to a Google search.
Lately I've been finding that quoting doesn't have strong effects and even more frustratingly "-" appears to no longer do anything. So instead of filtering out the word it just ends up giving me that word more and I have to search some complex baby robot speech to get nuanced results. Or maybe Google just hates me
Windows has a similar problem: marketing / ads is ruining an otherwise decent product.