Ask HN: Have search engines become hard of hearing?

Maybe my judgement is clouded, but it seems Google and other search engines have started to reinterpret search queries to a really annoying degree. More often than ever I have to put things in quotes to get what I am looking for. I often use quotes even with foresight that it will show nonsense otherwise. Is this a result of forcing "AI" methods to be a main ranking signal? I wished search engines would return to give simple full-text search precedence, or at least allow users to configure their own weights for different ranking signals.