Quoted terms no longer force results to contain exact words

Raised by 380 people over 18 years (2009–2026), in 18 of them.

What people report

2009-03
Most of my complaints are about their recent attempts to improve search results by automatically 'fixing' the queries I enter
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2018-07
I wish we had unpopular search engines that suck at pop.
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2021-04
I'd be able to use a zillion search operators to narrow in to the page that I was looking for. Now, that's impossible.
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2023-02
give me back my booleans operators!!!!
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2026-06
Google dumbed down search very badly and made it very hard to find obscure information
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Principle

User control and freedom

People report that quoted phrases and exact terms are reinterpreted, corrected or dropped, so the search does not do what they explicitly asked and the results are hard to predict.

A fix

Treat quoted terms as a strict requirement that is never relaxed, and if relaxing a query is offered, show it as a separate opt-in suggestion rather than silently mixing in results that lack the terms.

Grouping, principle and fix drafted with Claude and reviewed by Justusability. Counts are people whose comment Claude labelled a usability complaint about this issue; see Method for how, and its limits. Something wrong here?

All 471 source comments