Actually, typing out "what a novice normie means" made me realize what is the probable reason Google turned out the way it is: optimizing for new users. However, a growing userbase means most users are new to Internet in general, and (with big enough growth) most queries are issued by people who are trying a search engine out for the first time, and have no clue how or why it works - and those queries are exactly the kind of queries Google is now good at, queries like example you provided.
But if you insist on a dumb keyword search, Google still does that fine if you use quotation marks now in addition to the operator (e.g. +"band"). But I just tried +"band" with my band-vs-song example and all I got were worse results that excluded the artist's website because the artist didn't write the word "band" anywhere on the page -- as expected for a dumb keyword search.
There was no easy way to perform my band-vs-song search back then because Google didn’t understand context and the website doesn’t have the correct keywords. But modern Google knows context and I employ this fact regularly, allowing me to find stuff with modern Google like a magician compared to old Google or even Altavista.
If I were looking for a song, I would type in something like “song used at beginning of X movie indie rock”
He would type in “X songs.”
I basically find everything in Google in one search and it takes him several. I type in my thought straight whereas he seems to treat Google like a dumb keyword index.