Tell HN: Google doesn't work anymore for exact matches
I agree with your general point that the search quality has gone down, quotes doesn't even always work anymore to get exact results.Looking into your suggested example: That turned out to be interesting and unexpected.So, the exact string you put here was "David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born", which is what you get when you copy the text from the website. It's correct that it doesn't work on Google searching for verbatim.The actual DOM of the snippet looks like this:    “David, we have been expecting you - this is what you have
                           been searching for - this place, David, is where dreams are born.”

If you take any snippet of text that doesn't do a line-break, it seems exact searches do work, like "expecting you - this is what you have been searching for - this place" or "deep and melodious when it spoke".If you do take a snippet that does a line-break, then it cannot find anything, like "David, we have been expecting you" or "this place, David, is where "It seems that Google as unlearned how to treat different type of whitespaces, especially when the author/software has introduced manual line-breaks via the  HTML tag.I'm sure they have at one point introduced some "quality filter" that gives higher score based on how well the markup is made by the websites, for one reason or another, and eventually it got so "improved" or established that even if it's the only relevant hit for a human, the computer simply ignores the result for low scoring, since the markup is not 100% correct.