It's nice to see they've tried to work around the soft 404 problem in their docs, but it shouldn't be necessary. It's just another case of how Google has optimized out a use case that only developers rely on.

I've voiced similar complaints about how google parses my search query, but they seem to fall on deaf ears.

I don't know exactly when, but at some point between 2009 and 2010, google stopped allowing punctuation in exact string matches. An example, say searching for issues related to C# attributes: The first few results for the query "[StringLength]" are for C++'s string::length method, Java's String.Length, JavaScript, etc etc.

Google used to provide uncannily accurate results for such queries and apparently no one noticed when it was changed.