so you mean like "term1" "term2" -"term3" -"term4"? or if I wanted to do this without returning results from hackernews "term1" ... -"term4" -site:news.ycombinator.com ?
The problem is "whatever tiny 'power user' features that google had... don't seem to work at all now."
I think I know what they were talking about. A lot of times it appears that adding advanced terms to a query will change the estimated number of results yet all the top hits will be exactly the same. Also, punctuation seems to be largely ignored, e.g. searching "etc apt sources list" and "/etc/apt/sources.list" both give me the exact same results. Putting the filename in quotes also gives the same results as before.
Searching for specific error messages with more than a few key words or a filename is usually a nightmare.
I don't see how altavista is superior here