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Try opening the “Search tools” menu in the results page and selecting “Verbatim”... I think that makes “literal” searches work, because otherwise Google uses synonyms and language analysis to attempt to match your search to results.



The query parameter google adds for verbatim matches is tbs=li, so you can append that to the url, like

  https://www.google.com/search?q="somestring"&tbs=li
Some other uses of "tbs": https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p...


That too has consistently failed between 2007 and late 2020.

Now it just fails inconsistently (i.e. it sometimes works).


Google the company, runs on an algorithm of arbitrary complexity.




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