Though, even when I was doing indexing changes at Google, the common practice was to do A/B testing with both the most common queries and a uniformly random sample (see reservoir sampling) of queries in order to justify a go-live of indexing changes. The former explicitly over-weights common queries, and the latter still optimizes for the common case. (In case you're wondering, the worst query I had to manually check in A/B testing was [flesh hook suspension].)
Google used to turn off some of the query re-writing logic (that tries to fix your query) if you used a query operator. (It has been a while, but I think maybe even their "Kansas" user info database kept track of the last time you used an operator, and would turn off some of the cleverness if you had recently used a search operator, as it was a good signal that you were a power user capable of optimizing your own queries.) My understanding is that they don't disable any of the too-clever bits for power users any more, and that everything uses all of the cleverness of learn-to-rank all the time.
I suspect it has gotten even worse with learn-to-rank, as it must be incredibly difficult to intentionally under-weight the uncommon/difficult queries.
They did keep track of when users re-issued similar queries in a short period, as a signal that the ranking algorithm wasn't doing well. I think an optimal system would use learn-to-rank for the first query in a related sequence of queries, and then switch to turning some of the smarts off, and finally switching to a learn-to-rank algorithm trained only on later queries in these related query sequences. That way, they can avoid the secondary learn-to-rank instance from over-fitting the median/easy queries.
> dog apple dangerous
Today you should search:
> can dogs eat apples
And you get way better results with the second form. I've noticed that people who are stuck thinking that the right way to google is still the former overlap a lot with the crowd that keeps complaining google is worse now than it was before.
Otherwise, it there truly is a “right way of asking Google questions”, why doesn’t Google release and promote a guide about it so people can be more successful in their search?
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=dog%20apple%20dangerou...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=can%20dogs%20eat%20app...
Also worth comparing (seems to focus more on diabetes than cyanoglycosides. Diabetes is the bigger chronic problem, and cyanoglycosides are the bigger acute problem, so which is a bigger danger largely depends on how disciplined the owner is.):
https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+dangerous+about+feed...
Google has come full circle and turned into Ask Jeeves.
I used to think this way too, but I've come to realize that Google has turned from a search engine that returns results based on my input to an answer engine that actively tries to reframe whatever I enter into some other more generic query - usually with the intent of selling me something or returning SEO spam. I've also found that the old google-fu techniques are now so unreliable that they must have been deprecated. I can't tell you how often I use quotes in my query and see results that don't contain that text at all.