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.
Double quotes don't work. Putting '&tbs=li:1' at the end of the search string to get "verbatim" results no longer works. Most of the "hacks" from this 2003 O'Reilly book don't work: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/google-hacks/0596004478...
It's all turned to shit.
What is going on here?
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. :-)