We can argue whether there is place for more operators, or whether it's better on average for an average user to still be "outsmarted" by the engine, but it's clear what's going on - these aren't exact match results and the results often have zero relevance with what user is looking for precisely because the user knows the specific word WILL appear on the page they need and a page without that word WON'T be what they need. I don't know how much clearer we can be :) It used to work (or seemed to). Now it doesn't. It frustrates some people. That's it.
I've interpreted searches. Database searches, not web pages, but my problems should apply to web search too: For example, a user who types "märz 2019" with quotes might mean that string, in German, or might on the other hand mean that particular month and use the quotes to eliminate february 2019, march 2018, etc. And people enter the exact string they remember in the hope of avoiding a sea of mismatches, but then they either mistype or don't remember quite the right wording.
Don't mess with my search terms! Bring exact matches back! Only show pages that match the search terms!
The amount of automatically created synonyms is getting out of hand, it decided the name of where I work is a synonym for another company in the same business that's 15 miles away
It seems to me the main failing of Google is they have no good way to say "We understood your question, but the answer isn't on the internet".
Instead they just return a set of not very relevant results.
For basic keyword searches. It’s not uncommon for search users to want inexact equivalencies, synonyms or conceptually close search results. (Search for cold, get back rhinovirus). Every user and use case has different definitions/tolerances of “this term appeared on the page”
It’s a complicated topic, without simple solutions. I wrote about it here.
https://opensourceconnections.com/blog/2018/12/07/synonyms-b...