And the vast majority of the population is who use Google now, rather than web enthusiasts. It was probably causing people to get no results when they had quotes, and most people wouldn't know why.

how hard would it be for Googs to do the search as requested, see no results, then try without quotes?

they do this for other things that annoy the F out of me. for example, searching for a phone number. it's a specific set of numbers that is unique. if there's no results for that number (or very few), it gives me results for numbers that are similar like same area code, same prefix, different number. nope. that's not useful. in this situation, I'd much rather see that no results are found rather than making me think there's a result but forcing me to look closely that it is what I wanted

Also, how hard would it be for the majority of the population to learn this? They're perfectly capable of using the internet to find illegal drugs, porn and dirt on their dating partners. It's not like using quotes to get verbatim results is rocket science.

I would prefer a "technical user" mode. Heck, they could hide the option until they've deemed me "technical", by looking at my search terms. Anything is better than giving me pages and pages that don't contain the quoted term I'm looking for.

That mode exists, it's labelled "verbatim".

Verbatim is useful, but it's also going to an extreme.

That's really not what I want quotes to do though, I want a definitive "not found". But it might be a good compromise. Their whole jam now seems to be zero UI except the box, no filters no exact match checkboxes etc. Stuff like that would be really nice to have on the main search.

yeah, but then where's the line? if you start adding checkboxes or other switches to control the search, the next thing you know you have something that looks like a gnarly ffmpeg cmd

A gnarly ffmpeg CLI is exactly what we need for a service as complex as search. The people who can use such an interface are a tiny fraction, but they will produce a majority of economic innovation nonetheless.

Guess what: https://www.google.com/advanced_search

I work for Google Search and yes, that's something we are considering. No promise it will happen, but we do understand it might help people better understand there's no matches for what they wanted (though we do say that now, when it happens).

If there's no results, you have plenty of room for a "No results. Try without quotes?" bright blue link.

We don't need a checkbox because if you use quotes, we will match only content in the quotes, as our post explains. If there's no content at all that matches, only in that case will we show a message making it clear there's no match and that we've conducted a search without quotes.