Happens to me all the time now too. Even when I put the phrase in quotes it still omits words or says "search for X, do your really want to search for Y"
But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
But maybe our use cases are the outliers, and the new search is what works for most people.
I think it's a probability problem more often expressed in terms of medical tests / false positives. If a million people search for <word> but 1% of those make a typo and search for <wrod> instead, whereas a thousand people deliberately search for <wrod>, Google's observation of a search for <wrod> is 90% likely to be a typo.
However well-intentioned, this can undermine one of the core, original features of a good search engine like Google: deriving value from the "long tail" of esoteric (and often very technical) quests for information.
I switched to DDG a while ago, -it is about as good as Google now, much thanks to Googles own effort ower the last decade to nerf its own search engine.
Since they are now about equal I use the one that doesn't track me and doesn't support Google.
Not sure if they're using a statistical (DDG could never compete, too few searches performed) or an algorithmic (DDG could, in time, get this far too) pattern to achieve correct results.
EDIT: It's about the tenth result on DDG, the last one to show before having to click to load more results. Not bad, actually.
But if you wanted some esoteric, bizarrely specific thing indexed on a single page on a single site, you went with Google.
They're turning into Yahoo.
"Sulliven", a mount in northwestern Scotland, gets "fixed" to Sullivan.
It does work when quoted though
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Suilven/@58.120899,-5.4389...
it basically says, "I won't search for that keyword, here are some results without it"