I find this to be the case more and more. For very specific queries, Google has gotten to be rather annoying with overly aggressive term expansion and ignorance of particularly uncommon words. Bing actually pleased me this week due to the fact it respects searches in quotation marks without offering me partial matches.
I've noticed that as software and similar projects get older and more established, the developers believe they know how you should use their software better than you do.
This is almost never true, and leads to situations like this.
Why this is so would be a good case study for some academic research.