Comment by evouga

The best explanation I’ve seen is that Google only cares about the quality of the results when using completely natural language sentences (which I guess is how most non-technical people try to use it?) rather than the specialized search engine syntax with keywords, quotes, +/-, etc. we learned to use in 90s/00s.

It may optimize for the common case, but unlike the old system, leaves you completely helpless when it fails to “Just Work.”