I really wish there still existed a search engine which would absolutely, without reservation of any sort, simply respect the quote and minus operators. I searched both DDG and Google this morning for something with a minus operator, and the search results for both included the unwanted keyword in the bloody page title. And no, quotes never ever meant "search for similar terms", but the big players now just ignore all the syntax the power users have been used to for decades. Luckily the "site:" prefix still seems to work, but for how long?
Check out Runnaroo. It will respect those operators better than most.
Disclosure, this is my side project. It aggregates results from about 30 different vertical search engines based on the query. Google is actually the source for the web results.
Here's an example search for "GM" (saw that discussed earlier in this thread):
