That doesn't mean the quoted words weren't present in the content. It just means our system didn't think creating a snippet around those words was the most relevant snippet. Which I get, in some cases, actually would be better. It's something we're looking at.

Your system for snippet creation is so bad that according to you it's created a situation where many, many users believe that quotes don't work because of how bad it is.

Please fix it, like now. Displace your teams current sprint priorities, or the anti-google search backlash will turn into a situation where in 2025 Google is on the defensive for search market share from a Phoenix rising yahoo or something like that.

The fact that anyone at Google ever okayed this behavior at all in the first place is simply rage inducing and you should see that with the magnitude and persistence of the "actually it really doesn't work bro" kind of comments.

If a snippet doesn't contain the words I searched for, I don't click it, because I assume Google has fucked up the search again and given me some irrelevant thing. If that is what has actually changed in the last few years making people think results are bad, the snippet algorithm, please revert that. I want to see the exact context that the words I typed appear in the page.

In some cases? I'm literally asking for a specific word to be included no matter what; how could it be irrelevant to the quote used to describe a page?

Snippets we show tend to focus on full-sentences or enough context to describe what a page is about or relevant to a search. If we have a match that's strongest simply because a quoted term appears in ALT text or some obscure menu item, that probably doesn't generate a compelling snippet in how we normally would measure things. But given that for someone doing that quoting, seeing the quoted area might be the most important thing. So the regularly snippet process isn't as helpful -- and it's something we'll look at.