Nowadays verbatim mode may be synonymous with quotes, but it wasn't always. Google totally nuked it's verbatim search... just try searching for some command line option flag, e.g. "vagrant --debug" or something even more esoteric and watch it fail.
Yeah. I suspect that in this particular example it's getting confused by the dashes, which it interprets as an ignore flag. Very silly...
I've actually found that other search engines are actually better at technical searches than Google is nowadays: once, I was trying to search for Ketmax, a disassembler for DOS that could step both forward and backward in code. It was neat. But I couldn't find it.
No, Google, I don't want drugs; I don't want bikes; and I'm not Vietnamese (?!).
Trying a bunch of alternate search engines in rapid succession, ixquick quickly found a bunch of old FTP server index references: I forgot the "35.zip" on the end, and, in fact, just appending "35" was enough for Google to find it. (I'm not writing the concatenated string here so that I don't alter Google's index of the word.)
The Internet has gotten so big in recent years, and become completely overrun with useless information in triplicate; I can't help but wonder if it's forced Google search to take a more generalized approach to the way they sort and index information, with some loss of precision, in order to deal with the volume of fluff.
I was playing around with syllables a few months ago and discovered that the word "exikyut" appeared to be completely unindexed (except for a couple of junk "letter combination" sites), so I used it to make a few accounts. Then Google suddenly turned up a tweet from 2011 where someone had used my "new" username in conversation years prior. That was weird, being told it didn't exist then being told it did...
So yeah, Google's index is very imprecise. Great at sending you to StackOverflow for 1st year JavaScript questions, but nothing like Code Search used to be.
