A tip I saw here a couple of weeks ago that restored some quality to searches was to, after searching, open the drop-down menu from “Tools”, select “all results” and then “verbatim”.

I do all of my searches in incognito so sadly I don’t know if the options is remembered or not.

Huh, I didn't know that. I now use a meta engine, so I don't really keep up with Google dorking, but that is good to know for the few times I fall back to a Google search.

Ah! That sounds like a life saver!

Lately I've been finding that quoting doesn't have strong effects and even more frustratingly "-" appears to no longer do anything. So instead of filtering out the word it just ends up giving me that word more and I have to search some complex baby robot speech to get nuanced results. Or maybe Google just hates me