Nah their product is broken and I'm going to avoid using it from now on except when I need to find something on a map or mess around on SEO for work

If they break a key feature to MAKE a verbatim search happen with literally two keys pressed, and are apparently not even indexing what they used to anymore, they're dropping the ball. Most people know the quotation trick now and are probably assuming it still works

This is definitely the case. Sit down next to a casual user one day, and you'll find that 'verbatim' is the absolute last thing they need.

This is almost certainly the case. Those of us who learned to use and mastered keyword-style search are the minority. Most people search whole phrases, expecting a contextual answer.

The quality of search results I get from Google has seriously degraded over the past several years (I think about the time they decided to start interpreting my searches rather than just search for what I asked for). From my point of view, verbatim searches are more necessary now than ever before, to work around that issue.

I tried using verbatim searches to make Google decent for me again, but Google defines "verbatim" rather differently than I do.