Moved from google to duckduckgo years ago because google was ignoring my search terms. Now I'm moving from duckduckgo to https://www.mojeek.com/ because duckduckgo is ignoring my search terms. Haven't used it long enough to give an actual recommendation but it seems promising.
@madewokherd thanks for the rec! I was getting annoyed at duckduckgo ignoring my search terms and had no idea where t even begin looking for a solution. Might as well try this one for a while
@madewokherd this one ignored quotation marks so I guess I'm still on the lookout for something that lets me type literal text I want to be literally included in the result…
@madewokherd I typed "final fantasy" and got results with just final or just fantasy in them, or results with words between the two, instead of results that had the literal string "final fantasy" in them
google USED to obey quotes and they were a powerful way to search for, say, exact quotes from a book or article. but now I don't know how to do that anymore
@atinyfairy I don't think I've ever known a general search engine to do that, at best quotation marks mean searching for a specific sequence of words (regardless of punctuation).