Google allows you to search for "search engine" (notice the double quotes) and it’ll only show you results where the two words appear in this specific order.
At least only some of the time, unfortunately. What power users want is "grep for the Web", not "Google, tell me what you want me to see."
> What power users want is "grep for the Web", not "Google, tell me what you want me to see."
I can almost guarantee that nobody actually wants this. "Grep for the web" is strictly bad compared to a search engine that does the tiniest amount of query expansion. Google is definitely taking too many liberties in interpreting the query, but there are many things any search engine should do that will be a straight improvement over not doing them.
The problem with Google search right now is that it's hard to reason about why it gives the results it does, seemingly because they rely too heavily on embeddings to compare strings. It's frustrating when "cat food" matches "dog restaurant" because the two were semantically close in some embedding space that doesn't quite align with human reasoning.
At least only some of the time, unfortunately. What power users want is "grep for the Web", not "Google, tell me what you want me to see."