Yes! wtf is it with this these days? double quotes in google search used to have meaning... now you just get spammed with completely irrelevant crap and only a few instances of results with that word hidden after the first 20. It's like they are trying to hide from you that there are only a few _real_ hits.

Repeat `keyword3` to increase it's weight: `keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword3`

Quotes make keyword3 a requirement

You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

Except double-quotes work only as suggestion, they haven't been enforcing a verbatim search for quite a while now (AFAIR there is/was a "verbatim" switch hidden somewhere in Search Tools).

I use !gvb on duckduckgo to search on google with verbatim turned on. It's the only way to make it work more-or-less properly for me.

> You can work around this by putting the dropped keyword into double quotes.

Often. It seems sometimes I get selected for an A/B test where they just ignore parts of my query even if I use doublequotes and verbatim option.

Also this becoming standard means Google have taken a(nother) step backwards since 2009.

Which might be a good thing in the long run. It means competition has even better chances. :-)

DuckDuckGo has improved a lot for me the past year. I used to retry my query on Google when the results were not enough but I don't need to as often now.

Same for me. I've had DDG as the default search engine for a while now. Initially mostly for the instant results and bang shortcuts, but these days I find myself using !g very very rarely.

Same here as well. And I've been finding DDG to even given better results increasingly often, at least on the sample of searches that I've used multiple engines for.

The one thing I really miss is insta-results for things like 'population of USA'. On the other hand, I think Google was going a bit too far with that and started giving insta-results that at times were subjective, or even simply wrong.

Time for the next step: An open source search engine.

I've been using findx.com as my default search engine lately. I still use the find on google option often though, since it's not nearly as good as DDG (There is a search on DDG option next to the Google one as well).