There was a moment in time where quotes and negeation hyphens were completely ignored. I have no idea why they ever thought that was a good idea.
Apparently Google search has been optimized for the lowest common denominator of an idiot.
Truly shameful. If anything, it's the idiots who should be forced to use the UX of lesser idiots like myself. Let them select the "Hazy" constraint from the advanced menu.
If DDG (or any alternative not incentivized to serve dimwits) would do this by default, I'd switch in a heartbeat and never look back.
Instead, it should be possible to set that as a preference so that it persists across your searches.
If I could opt out of this shitty Big-G reality by means other than suicide, I gladly would.
As for the "hazy" mode, I suspect it's the defaut because it uses a cheaper, smaller index limited to popular queries.
Or are you saying it returns pages without the text on it at all? I don't think that's the case.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not Search.
>string of bytes which I have quoted
That's tricky. What if there's a line break? What if you search for "some text" but the html contains "some <b>text</b>"? Punctuation would be a problem too. What if you searched for something with "-" (hyphen-minus, unicode 0x2d), but the page contained a "‐" (hyphen, unicode 0x2010)? What if you searched for something with a dumb quote, but the page contained a smart quote? What if you searched for something with a space but the page contained a non-breaking space?
Are you suggesting that people will discard a result based on the snippet presented? I ignore the snippets entirely, as they are seldom relevant, and click each link in the results.
Especially if I have put quotes around a word I really want.
(Same problem with GDP as a measure of economic productivity BTW, but that's a topic for another day.)