I know gmail is different than search, but if you do a quoted search for a string in gmail that has zero matches, it will return a few "close" matches.

This really confused me, because I was trying to find something specific, and it found a few emails, so I read them, and then was confused that they didn't actually take about the specific thing I was trying to remember. Then I realized that they I included one of the words from my string.

In this case, a close match was completely useless, and ended up wasting my time reading irrelevant results. A message saying "we didn't find that, but here's a few close matches" would have been more helpful and avoided wasting my time.

The reasons in this thread about non precise search results are half the reason I stopped using Google Search about a year ago. I get why they've done it, but I don't like it.

I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.

I just added www.google.com###main to my uBlock filters, to remind me about falling down googling inspired rabbit holes :)

I either use duckduckgo or google in another browser that I don't normally use.

This happened to me just this week! I was trying to find a specific Onion article, so I searched various permutations, many of them including "the onion" which wasn't respected in the result output. I was absolutely furious that the one escape hatch I have to ameliorate bad searches was taken away from me.

Give it a try - I run CookieAutoDelete so it is 'theoretically' a clean search each time if that makes any difference.

I don't know whether this is necessarily the cause of your issue, but I discovered one reason why it doesn't always work. On mobile Safari, iOS ends up inserting smart quote characters rather than straight quotes when you type them. Google ends up ignoring the smart quote characters. To work around this, I have to hold down the " button to explicitly make the keyboard insert the straight quote character.

Are you saying that it was returning pages that didn't contain the phrase "the onion", or just weren't articles from The Onion? What was the exact search term?

Does that happen for words that aren't likely stopwords?

Google appears to respect the quotes for me. Changing the example query above to `"film" "noir" -"film noir"` returns results that mention noir films but not the phrase "film noir". However, searching for `film noir -"film noir"` without quotes on the individual words does return a Netflix page titled "Film Noir".

It's more noticeable for niche topics, which google tends to struggle with in general.

I remember trying to google something about Sufism and its relationship to mysticism and the occult...and google brought up a bunch of results from right wing conspiracy websites claiming that Islam was related to the "New World Order".