No and no.

You can put phrases in quotes and some of the initial results may rearrange themselves to reflect this intention that you've signaled but, overall, you'll still get many results that either contain different arrangements of those terms or don't contain them at all.

The minus sign has even hazier functionality and completely falls apart if you are searching --command-line options, etc.

It's not like this isn't a solved problem ... altavista had properly functioning (and complex) boolean operators that worked to give you very precise search results.

The reason you can't do that with google is that google doesn't want you to.

Google used to support all those things - quoted phrases, NOT, minus sign, etc. In fact, for a long time, unlike other search engines, using a + sign (for "must include this term") was unnecessary because every search term was interpreted that way implicitly.

Not only did google have the largest index, it also had the best search engine -- there's a reason they won on search. These days, they still have the largest index and the best crawler, but I'd argue they don't have the best query handler. At least DuckDuckGo takes what I say literally.

I remember 15-20 years ago when you could do complex searches with Google, and while it was great for power users, most regular users had issues with it, since searching "how do I replace a car wheel?" would search for that literal string, instead of parsing it to "how to replace a car wheel"

That said, maybe my memory is fuzzy and there was a time where Google search allowed rich queries and also did a good job at guessing users intentions.

About 10 years or so ago … google was ridiculously good. The web practically jumped out of the screen at you. It’s been piss poor for like the last 5 years or so though.

Someone else commented here in a past thread that the biggest cliff happened when Amit Singhal left Google and the AI lead John Giannandrea replaced him.

John Giannandrea brought about more AI heavy search and forced 'natural language' queries down the throat of everyone.

It obviously makes google money and is the right tool for popular queries. But for anyone doing more 'power user' searches it is just inept and I agree with GGP duckduckgo is now a better search engine for more complex queries.

You are the product. Their goal is to generate revenue with ads and links to their paying customers on the results page. Giving you precise results works against this objective.

no you are an edge case the rest of the world ie non tech users prefer the way google understands the queries and answers them.

The word "prefers" implies that the choice was made after evaluating other options.

The word you should use is "accepts".

The rest of the world clicks on more ads this way. I believe that's their most important metric.