Holy cow! Just to expand on my previous comment below, but a different use case. Exact search, you have to use quotes seems to be completely busted as well. The company I work for builds websites, we have thousands and we have a common phrase in the footer. I would use Google to help find example sites. Well, as of at least this morning, assuming this is as old as Google's July 1st update exact match no longer works.

I used to get 100's of great results. Now, I get less than 30 and over 70% are spam. You are correct that something is completely wrong. It is 100% broken in this case.

I just can not believe how horrible this is. Just to emphasis how bad it is, I even tried a combination of the phrase in the footer plus the name of the company. It would not return any results for that company/website. Just spam results.

What is going on here?