However, it's becoming useless for infrequent searches. Try googling any random error message and notice 90% of the results don't even contain it.
One, I do not share this experience, and think the quality issue is overstated (you are more likely to remember the time that a query failed, than when it succeeded).
Two, if you can produce a POC, Google can use this to improve the search results.
As is, the issue brought up by original poster is too vague and unspecified to be of any use.
You can still revert to the original behaviour by selecting 'Verbatim' from the search tools menu, but you cannot make it default. And in time I'm sure some marketing head will remove even that option.
Edit: and if you never experience it, my guess is you're working with some technology that's "in fashion".
I do agree that Google is focusing more and more on the common internet user, and not the early tech adopters. This forces us to use tricks like the double quotes, while keeping the search engine user-friendly for the vast majority of ad-clicking internetters.
The behavior you are referring to is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_expansion and while this improves the search results for many people with imprecise or misspelled queries, if you trained yourself to search with exact matches, you'll need some time to adapt (or get in the habbit of adding double quotes).
Come on!!! This is not my first rodeo. I’ve been on the InterNet (yes, with a capital N) since 1993 and I use double quote searching all the time, except that in cases like these one gets zero results back.
Apparently you are the only person in the universe that regularly gets never-before-seen error messages. I feel for you, but I hope you stay away from any issue tracker I am involved in, because no matter your vast experience, the quality of your error reporting is downright poor.
If exact match search is unable to find your error message, then you wouldn't have found it on 2005 Google either. You wouldn't find it on any other search engine. You are (poorly and vaguely) describing a problem that must have always been there and blaming it on an unrelated recent UI change.
All the while unable/unwilling to give a single concrete example, just noisy ranting. For all I know you are, despite your experience, banging your head against the keyboard, until you get 0 results. The burden is on you to show that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun. Good luck!
That’s where you’re wrong: I’ve used the double quotation marks search technique since before Google and I’ve known about it and used it since Google’s debut.
I already told you I’m not compiling anything and can’t give you a reproducible test case right now but you chose to disregard that; I’ve also told you what to do to reproduce the problem yourself (“attempt to compile GCC, get an error, search with Google with and without double quotation marks”), but you don’t want to do that because it’s a lot of work, I know, but that’s your problem and here’s why:
The burden is on you to show that there is a teapot orbiting the Sun.
that is why, since you’re wrong again: I’ve switched to “DuckDuckGo” as my primary search engine and rarely use Google any more since the results are nothing but advertising-soiled false positives; I don’t care whether you do something about it or not. Now, you might wisen up and take my feedback about exact or partial error searching earnestly or not. You wanted feedback, you got it; your move on what to do about it. Good luck.
Why should we have to work around it?
Google is really good at that. I can't use DDG for programming because DDG thinks I want to learn more about Elm trees.
To understand "poe" as path of exile, it helps to know that you at least once searched for path of exile. After it has seen a few hundreds users do that, it will make the connection.
To know that "poe shavs" refers to the game and not Edgar Alan Poe, it probably had to provide a link to a relevant author's name and to the game's page and watch which links people would more likely click.
There is a chicken and egg here. People want a search engine that can read their minds without invading their privacy, that's a hard problem.