I think you just solved a huge grievance I've been having with Google search. I get absolute trash results that are hardly even tangential to what I searched. I'm going to try out this verbatim thing.
The issue I have is that if the topic could even remotely sell me something, those selling or reviewing the thing sold in order to sell it will be the only results. The communities actually interested and talking about the things have disappeared from the results.
One trick that works for some topics is to limit your search to a custom time range like pre 2005 or so. Specifically this only works for information that would have been available then, but when that is the case you can avoid a ton of modern spam.
I've actually stopped trying to search google for things anymore, because it almost always tried to be clever and totally missed the point. Sounds like I should try "verbatim" too!
Not right now, I've just done it enough times. It's often when I want to do a search with 6+ words and all of them are important. But because some of them are e.g. "C++ default constructor" google just gives me C++ 101 answers and disregards the rest of my query.
The searches had to do with real things as well as programming.
Yea, this one happens a lot. I was getting scope 101 results for something I was searching yesterday. I've basically given up on mobile search, it feels worse there.
From this past weekend, I was trying to find a shirt I'd seen another student wear back when I was in highschool (~2004), with what I thought was the phrase "How many plants had to die for your stupid salad?"
Just about all the results were for vegan activism, without a hint of it being a joke/phrase.
The top result when switching to "verbatim" mode was the joke, standalone, correcting "plants" to "vegetables". (Searching for the correct phrase in either mode got me to a zazzle page with a shirt identical to what I remember, but that's not really relevant to "use verbatim search!")
