It depends what you're looking for. If it's an error message, you probably want that exact string, not results that are errors but don't include the string.
It used to be that searching literally "restaurants" (i.e. with quotes) would search for an exact match (particularly useful for multi-word searches in those days), but no more. It's taken as a 'hint' or something, I believe, but not an absolute instruction.
If I’m doing a google search, you’re probably right. If I’m searching my gmail account, you’re probably wrong. I’ve searched for exact phrases that occur in my email (for both gmail and outlook) and failed to get the matches anywhere in the results (and had to find them by other means). Same with Jira. It’s very frustrating to have to sort through hundreds or thousands of messages for the result you wanted.
The gmail one in particular drives me absolutely bonkers. Like, I don’t care if the search needs to take 15 seconds to do, just find the email with the phrase that I know is there!
This is even more frustrating when you do a date constrained search and google tells you there are no emails from that date, but if you page through manually, it’s there. I feel like gmail is constantly gaslighting me.
Is it so weird that websites for restaurants would literally have the word “restaurant” on it somewhere? Eg
> Foobar Canteen is a 2 Michelin star restaurant located in the heart of Soho.
This used to be how search engines knew what was a page about restaurants and what wasn’t.
But in any case, the problem with not returning exact strings is those times when you do need exact strings. Like researching a famous quote, passage of text or software error message.
If I search for "restaurants", I want search results that ARE restaurants, not search results which have the word "restaurants" in them.
What do you want to have happen?