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Notes -
Usually in the past if I copy/pasted something into Google in quote marks, it would quickly point me towards the right thing.
A week or two ago when I was working on a project that required this, I had a weird experience. If I'm recalling the exact sequence right, it told me it didn't have any matches - but then, when I scrolled down, the correct match was something like third from the top - the algo seemed to only be checking the preponderance of the words, and thus even when it could correctly source what I was looking for, it wouldn't flag as a 100% match.
So even though it had exactly what I was looking for, it didn't act as if it did.
Even when it does point you to the right thing, it is also showing you other things now -- in the deep(ish) past, if you put something in quotes it would only show results containing that string. Similarly (although I think this went away first), a search for -(thing you don't want to see) used to result in zero results containing that term -- now if you search for "used cars -chevy" it probably shows you fewer chevys than otherwise, but you are still going to see some. Particularly harmful when you are looking for something with one extremely common straightforward set of results (that you are not interested in) and an alternate niche interpretation. (the thing you want to find!)
AI influence seems to be making this a bit worse, I suspect since the "this is probably what he really wants" is more strongly weighted -- but it might be corpus frequency effects too I suppose.
What's frustrating is that I am pretty sure a nonzero portion of this is simply due to boost ad revenue.
Death by a thousand straws on the back of the goose that laid the golden egg.
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