That is the coercion I mentioned. I wish I could provide an example, but there have been times where I have to both "quote" the terms I really want and -"quote" the terms it corrected things to. It usually only happens for longer queries when I'm trying to drill into a specific issue.
Come to think of it, perhaps this is their feature which uses previous searches and treats your current search as a continuation of the last one; though I've altered my query the search terms I abandoned get resurrected.
[Edit: confirmed!] I just tried this in relation to another comment I posted. I typed peer to peer lending into Chrome's bar to search for this. A bunch of finance related results came up. I was looking for movie lending, so I altered my search to peer to peer lending movies and looked at the results. Still unsatisfied, I thought that maybe the term borrowing was better than lending. So I changed my search to peer to peer borrowing movies. Lo and behold, the search results show a page full of results with the word lending bolded and no results that show borrowing at all: http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY
If I absolutely didn't want the word lending in the results, I would need to alter the search to peer to peer borrowing -lending movies to avoid this. For development searches where I'm sometimes trying to find a needle in a haystack, I don't want to have to keep excluding numerous terms I have already decided are undesirable. As I never sign in when searching and I can't be bothered to find and change whatever Google setting causes this every time I fire up my browser, I find DDG to work the way I expect and often with better results too.
Come to think of it, perhaps this is their feature which uses previous searches and treats your current search as a continuation of the last one; though I've altered my query the search terms I abandoned get resurrected.
[Edit: confirmed!] I just tried this in relation to another comment I posted. I typed peer to peer lending into Chrome's bar to search for this. A bunch of finance related results came up. I was looking for movie lending, so I altered my search to peer to peer lending movies and looked at the results. Still unsatisfied, I thought that maybe the term borrowing was better than lending. So I changed my search to peer to peer borrowing movies. Lo and behold, the search results show a page full of results with the word lending bolded and no results that show borrowing at all: http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY
If I absolutely didn't want the word lending in the results, I would need to alter the search to peer to peer borrowing -lending movies to avoid this. For development searches where I'm sometimes trying to find a needle in a haystack, I don't want to have to keep excluding numerous terms I have already decided are undesirable. As I never sign in when searching and I can't be bothered to find and change whatever Google setting causes this every time I fire up my browser, I find DDG to work the way I expect and often with better results too.