I wish people were more creative with naming things. The other day I searched the letter S and the first thing that came up was some Swedish singer. Or at least have search engines understand guillemets.
At least for Google, putting in "X" (with the quotes) used to mean: Search for things containing exactly X. This was one of the best ways to search for technical information (for example error messages) after they made the default search algorithm less precise.
Then later they butchered/removed that too - so all you get now is some generalized garbage for results that is not really relevant to your specific problem.
I guess the problem they wanted to combat is that Google would deliver no useful results at all for overly specific queries, so they made it "generalize" always.
Software development is not really the only sector that has this problem with Google now though, it's just that devs can usually tell that Google is the problem.
Searching for anything specific and technical has become hard.
Google used to be great at finding stuff you needed for work in your field, and sometimes bad at finding everyday everybody stuff. Now it's reversed.
disclaimer: I am usually critical of google and for the most part, for bland generic search, have moved away to ddg (usually end up using the 'g!' for technical searches).
Silently depricating bolean operators and quotes was definitely bad for power users but let's be realistic these queries are probably the most resource intensive for google and equally not likely to bring ad revenue.
The bigger issue to me is that even a company like google, with near unlimited resources, seems to be unable to fight off SEO/spam/bots in order to show content with substance to end users. In the last 10 or 15 years this has become scaringly noticeable. The spammers have won the war.
