That, when searching for a string, I don't want exact matches to appear in the results.
If your search ever DOESN'T return exact matches (barring common misspelling correction), you're doing something seriously wrong.
Even worse, Google sometimes shows results that don't even contain text you've specified an exact match for with double quotes, e.g. "find me"
There is a tab-style link directly below the search box called "Tools" in the search results page. Once clicked it displays a few settings and one of them can be set to "Verbatim".
Choose that and your search terms will actually be what is searched for, as opposed to some arbitrary subset of it. I wish this was better documented.
It's infuriating, because presumably I don't always happen to see the unknowingly hidden option.
If I search for "restaurants", I want search results that ARE restaurants, not search results which have the word "restaurants" in them.
What do you want to have happen?
It used to be that searching literally "restaurants" (i.e. with quotes) would search for an exact match (particularly useful for multi-word searches in those days), but no more. It's taken as a 'hint' or something, I believe, but not an absolute instruction.
This is even more frustrating when you do a date constrained search and google tells you there are no emails from that date, but if you page through manually, it’s there. I feel like gmail is constantly gaslighting me.
> Foobar Canteen is a 2 Michelin star restaurant located in the heart of Soho.
This used to be how search engines knew what was a page about restaurants and what wasn’t.
But in any case, the problem with not returning exact strings is those times when you do need exact strings. Like researching a famous quote, passage of text or software error message.
However, as someone who already learned to translate my desires into keywords, it's freaking annoying.