The key for people who don't get why it was so much work for Google is this: where I just wrote "then go through all of them for which ones had my phrase in literal order" I meant "then go through all of the cached contents of every single one of the web pages on the results list -- since the joined list itself would have every web site that has those 6 words, which is pretty much every English-language page on the web of more than a few thousand words. So it neeeded to scan through the cached contents of all of them to find which ones had the phrase in order."

For example I just looked at the top post on Reddit right now, it's about 20 page-downs of comments, and has the words this many times:

   from 17
   what 22
   it 223
   is 169
   to 195
   a - more than 1000

pretty much every English-language web page on the whole Internet will have those words, unless it is very short.