The quote used to enforce "must include expression" but this is no longer true with google queries.

My guess is that, by now, resource intensive 'power users' are not worth the effort for google.

For technical queries I moved on to ddg, it's not perfect but a hell of a lot less time waisted.

Do you have any evidence to support that? The Google documentation indicates quotes are still the exact match operator https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

I have nothing to point to, but my experience is that enclosing terms in quotes makes no actual difference.

Google search has been getting increasingly worse for me over the last five years or so. In terms of the quality of search results, it has no edge over DDG.

I stand corrected, I wanted to provide some examples but I cannot reproduce this anymore.

From memory I do recall the +/- and "" operator being overriden if there was a "popular" search query that contained broader results than my specific query.

Specifically for the "" operator was that the query would drop "" so instead of showing x results which must include that expression it would show broader results as if the expression was not contained in "".

There was a time, several years ago now, where that was happening pretty regularly to me. It's gotten better, but since 2009 or so Google search quality has been on the decline for me. It only works well when I use things like site:blah.blah or quoted searches, or something I happened to search for and click on before (but couldn't find in history or had found on another computer). Finding novel things is a pain.

I do this sometimes, and it still ignores the quoted words in favour of giving me whatever results they want. I'm not sure when it was changed to no longer require quoted words in the results, but I usually just give up on the search at that point.

It frequently notifies you that it's ignoring a term in your search to give you a particular result: you see those "Doesn't contain: X" messages associated with a "must contain: X" link to override it... which I think just does the query over again but with that term in quotes.

Yeah but what I meant was that this is becoming increasingly frequent. I mean you would think that Google would try to include pages matching your full query in the top results and then when you keep moving to subpages it could give some less related hits as well. Now I often see these in the top 3 results.

Yes, in general I'd agree with the sentiment that Google trends more toward trying to show you "popular" content and changing your search to fit that, rather than the other way around.

With the amount of stuff that gets shoved into Google search bars worldwide, it's easy to believe that kind of strategy is broadly beneficial, but it does lead to frustration when you're being precise with a query and you're overridden.

Even those messages are very unreliable, though.

I wind up having to add "wiki" to about 25% of queries.

That's actually not what's happening in OP's search (at least when I run it): Germany is included in every single snippet I see, it just isn't relevant for most of them. "ambassador to germany" works, though.

Did you really mean "us" "ambassador" "germany"?

Here are some results for Taylor Swift instead: