Isn't that the point of searching: find a specific thing in a whole bag of other things? I don't use Google to find the Yahoo homepage (I know many people actually do; should we help them???)
If you were right, Altavista would have prevailed and Google would not have emerged; the way Altavista worked was, they linked the words in a query with the "OR" operator, so that any query produced at least some results, however irrelevant.
If you were right, Google would have done this from the start; why are they doing it now?
(Could it be because focus groups are taking over?)
Besides, what I'm complaining about is different from automatic spell correction; when you mistype a query Google automatically searches for (what it thinks are) the correctly spelled words, but it tells you about it and let you search for your original query with just one click.
Having "add" match "append" is done silently, without any visible option to disable it.
And if you have many words that you need to prefix with + it gets crazy; in theory there's the "allintext:" parameter, but if you use it often you get flagged as a bot and can't search at all.
I think I'd pay to have access to a "Google Pro" service where all these tricks would be disabled; no Instant, no fuzzy search, no nothing. Like 2001 Google.