I've found search operators and quotes are less and less effective — especially on Google, but on other search engines as well — as time goes on. I think OR/AND were removed a long time ago, and things like + and quotes aren't effective, because they're still subjected to the same processing (stemming, synonym substitution, whatever ML nonsense Google does) as plain queries. So in general, you don't get what you're searching for; you get what most people making a similar query would get.

It's made it harder to search for bits of poetry, quotations, or song lyrics, especially.

Google removed + over a decade ago: https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-...

>I've found search operators and quotes are less and less effective — especially on Google

On Google, I treat my search terms like a Venn diagram if I want good results.

Eg: want an article about the texas blackouts, but not the ones a decade ago?

Type "texas blackout npr 2022" minus quotes.

But if you do that on other engines, it may be MUCH more literal, the literal intersection of those terms, and I need to do the opposite: use as few terms as possible, possibly paired with using the site: operator, intitle operator, or other things.

>It's made it harder to search for bits of poetry, quotations, or song lyrics, especially.

Yeah to be completely clear, my default is DuckDuckGo, then very rarely I fall back to Google, but often if I'm doing that it's because I didn't want to trouble a librarian -- they talk about privacy, but I had a series of unfortunate events when I told one I want to use books as much as possible because I absolutely don't want some of these tech bros to know what I'm looking up.

(That dichotomy of folks who know information science and those who have critical thinking or coding skills needs to end, now. I'm an alumni of one of the highest ranked schools of information science in the world, and I will not be figuratively or literally extorted into a PhD to get roles others get with a bachelors.)

I had the same idea but the "2022" seems to be the bit which gets nearly always ignored (in my subjective opinion)

Quotes aren't what they once were. They don't guarantee that the term you quoted will be in the results.

I find using the 'verbatim' option under tools is usually necessary to get the exact phrase. However if I also try to use an exact date range (uploaded in past five years, say), then the verbatim option is automatically disabled. Can't do both at the same time, it's really annoying.

>They don't guarantee that the term you quoted will be in the results.

They do guarantee it. Sometimes Google is buggy and messes up in determining what's page is actually visible on the page compared to just being somewhere in the HTML.

That's a loose definition of guarantee, I think. They know what's on the page because they include a brief summary in the results, but even there quoted terms don't always appear.

Here's an example someone posted a few months back where google decided the user didn't really want what they said they wanted:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30132344

The page Google saw might not be the one you get if you click the link they give you. This kind of thing is in the SEO bag of tricks.

I increasingly find that formulating queries as a proper question gives the best results. Often even in the summary on the top.

When was the last time search operators actually mattered on Google?

Try Yandex image search, you'll be surprised how good it is.

Yandex has an excellent reverse image search.