So you might be lucky if the inferred intent of the engine was correct, but good luck steering it away. It doesn't help pretty much all query logic operators are merely hints nowadays, more often ignored than not.
I very much preferred a dumber engine for this reason, since it was way easier to search precisely and avoid SEO, even as the SEO game changed.
I'm also using a local searx instance now. I'm not terribly happy about it as bing/ddg also have very similar issues, so searching for exact terms still doesn't work the way it should. But it's much easier to blackhole SEO silos, pre-filter queries NOT matching my exact queries, as well as yielding more obscure content.
I want pure keywords-based search engine back [1]. If the keywords verbatim are not there, give me zero results back. It will be less time consuming to refine my query, or conclude that the stuff I am looking for is just not there. It's much better than sifting through low-precision results.
Google has 'verbatim' mode as such, which used to work well. I can't figure what they are doing to it, and why.
On the other hand, for slightly more complex queries, in last months there's been an enormous flood of low quality GitHub / StackOverflow / blog post copy-pasta spam pages.
And overall Google quality is really getting worse for discoverability of internet gems or interesting pages with good writing; unless you use specific unique keywords (site's unique name etc.) and/or heavily use double-quotes, it will find SEO-optimized pages with low quality.
I use Searx or DuckDuckGo for these searches. While their results are often worse at the top, they provide a wealth of understanding and documentation that Google seems to just.. skip? To me, finding things is more difficult when there are two opposing sides trying to outsmart one another.
I dare you, remove all google cookies, logout (like - dont use chrome*) and try again. I think you will get to the same results as I did.
And regarding google spying on me - I will rather not use it at all. Even without the searx, there are viable alternatives like qwant.com.
As I have said, I believe the results are based on your queries from past (AI based) and if you are not using the google spyware ecosystem, the results are horrible.
Twenty years ago, I had an actual advantage over others due to knowing how to write a good query and find the appropriate result (Google-fu). Nowadays that skill is largely obsolete.
This site cloning has always been an issue. Before the current iteration of SO/GH SEO clone farms, you had sites doing the same thing with expertsexchange and cloned forum pages. I do find it odd that Google won't just block the big ones, but perhaps they internally don't like doing one off hacks and prefer to find a cleaner algorithmic solution?