Not even this is sufficient any more. They now have a "verbatim" search, but I think even then some terms can be ignored -- terms which are not conventional "stopwords" like the.

Yes, verbatim is distinctly broken sometimes.

edit: It's not tedious for me on my browser, just click Verbatim on the LHS of page. (Can select that or All results)

I don't see that on the LHS. It would be nice if there's a link to it, something like https://www.google.com.au/search?verbatim=true that I could bookmark. Edit: or somehow set as the browser's default search engine.

add tbs=li:1 to the url:

http://google.com/search?q=hacker+news&tbs=li:1

Nice. Did you discover that (gleaned from url) or is it some documentation?

From the url, I don't think they have a documentation :)

Maybe "verbatim" is the same as putting quotes around every word. The verbatim search seems a bit tedious to activate: search for something, press "Tools", then "All results" and pick "Verbatim" in the drop-down. Although once activated, it stays activated for subsequent searches.

That helps. Even if you go to the advanced search, https://www.google.com/advanced_search, and use the box "all these words", you need to quote the words for it to take you seriously. I didn't give a good example, since there are no matches for that search (except reflections back to this discussion), but in other cases there are legitimate results that only appear after pages of invalid results.

Testing your hypothesis:

https://imgur.com/a/yvo3y

I think that's a good result, yea? If so, I'm glad it helped! Typically I use the double quotes to search for specific code/error strings and then use non-quoted words in the query to help filter the results to specific context, like the app name or topic. Others suggested the "Verbatim" option.