Google's search engine seems to assume that every user is 3 years old, and never interested in anything detailed, but instead trying to learn basic human tasks.
This does not only not work when searching for very specific technical terms (that Google likes to replace/expand with superficially similar but completely irrelevant terms). I get that that's probably a minority of searches. But I think it's even worse for more common searches, since now the sphere of SEO spam that you will be inundated with in your results is drastically expanded, with additional spam that only matches because Google did not take your search terms more literally!
And then "verbatim mode" takes way too many clicks to activate (every single time), and is mutually exclusive with setting time constraints (e.g. search results for "last month").
I understand why more and more of my queries auto-suggest "reddit" as the last term. By now, you rather have to hope that a human has asked a similar question on reddit, and that other humans happened to know the answer, instead of searching for yourself. It used to be the opposite.
Designing for or at least in mind of multiple personas can help; Microsoft used to design things with 3 in mind. But bosses can see anything extra as too much work, not worth it, and if not kill it outright at least deprioritize and delay it indefinitely to the same effect. Another trick is to sneak stuff in under FUD about ADA lawsuits; at the very least you can ship a nice set of keyboard shortcuts for power users to 'discover'.
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1I remember verbatim. It wasn't good. It couldn't find even small fluctuations in spelling or the precise wording of a target. Three or four parallel searches to go through all the tenses of verbs.