I would be interested to see an example of it ignoring quotes silently because I've heard a lot about it. I use search terms in quotes relatively often and have never noticed that, although it does the 'did you mean without quotes' thing all the time.

In the past for very long tail content, I've found Bing and Yandex to be useful. Yandex image search in particular is often better than Google or Bing, particularly if you are searching for people because it does some facial recognition.