I know people say it still doesn't work, but I find adding quotes completely effective for me when I need the precise keyword. Not sure what I'm doing differently.
It can be really egregious, too: I've searched for `foo` and had it say `Showing results for bar. Search for "foo" instead?` Then I follow the link that it provided and it still is searching for `bar` with the same prompt to refine the search, even though the double quotes are clearly still present.
Google was excellent, the process took me about 2-3 hours to get everything clear in my head, the documents went off in the mail, and the certification has been issued in the UK.
So yeah, I don't know what your experience is, but it's not mine.
That is generally no longer true, due to human nature and the rise of walled platforms and/or non-Web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Medium, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. Most content is either private, or public as part of an offhand comment/discussion thread. Actual public pages with high quality content are near extinct.
In the few cases where it may be true, the results are sorted for the common denominator, especially since most people who would be looking for such niche information have disabled personalization, so Google can only assume that you are an average person who wants common denominator results.
Google is fine for memes, news, and the other things that normal people regularly look for on the internet. Where it really breaks down is where it used to shine—finding obscure information about highly technical niche topics. Its obsession with guessing synonyms (and ignoring your efforts to tell it to knock it off) is a major handicap for finding any content with a target audience smaller than a few million people, and while stripping out advanced search operators may smooth the path for the 80th percentile of searches, it cripples the remaining 20 percent.
If your assistant stays firmly within the 80% that work, then yeah, Google is better than ever. But they made the 80% work seamlessly by giving up entirely on the 20% that people on forums like this really cared about.