Holy cow! Just to expand on my previous comment below, but a different use case. Exact search, you have to use quotes seems to be completely busted as well. The company I work for builds websites, we have thousands and we have a common phrase in the footer. I would use Google to help find example sites. Well, as of at least this morning, assuming this is as old as Google's July 1st update exact match no longer works.
I used to get 100's of great results. Now, I get less than 30 and over 70% are spam. You are correct that something is completely wrong. It is 100% broken in this case.
I just can not believe how horrible this is. Just to emphasis how bad it is, I even tried a combination of the phrase in the footer plus the name of the company. It would not return any results for that company/website. Just spam results.
Using double quotes has been busted (at least for some searches) for literally years. This isn't, in general, a new phenomenon. You were lucky it worked for you as long as it did.
Read the other posts for some other ideas of what's happening.
My opinion is that Google doesn't need to care. The company's market cap, as of today, is $1831 Billion dollars. So Wall Street doesn't care either. Larry Page is hiding out in New Zealand, and he probably doesn't give a shit either. :-)
I noticed things started going sideways around the time Google+ was launched. Someone decided that + in the search engine had to be reused for the doomed platform. Sad.
I used to get 100's of great results. Now, I get less than 30 and over 70% are spam. You are correct that something is completely wrong. It is 100% broken in this case.
I just can not believe how horrible this is. Just to emphasis how bad it is, I even tried a combination of the phrase in the footer plus the name of the company. It would not return any results for that company/website. Just spam results.
What is going on here?