[thisisnotatest]

I feel your pain. Two workarounds when Google gets it wrong are to put the term in quotation marks, or to enable Verbatim mode in the toolbelt. (I know various people have come up with ways to add "Google Verbatim" as a search engine option in their browser, or use a browser extension to make Verbatim enabled by default.)

Disclaimer: I work on Google search.

[Y_Y]

Both of these options are disappointing, in my experience. Verbatim mode seems weirdly broken sometimes (maybe it's overly strict), and quoting things is rarely enough to convince Google that you really want to search for exactly that thing and not some totally different thing that it considers to be a synonym.

One porridge is too hot and the other is too cold. I know Google could find a happy compromise here if it wanted to. In fact, I bet there's some internal-only hacked-together version that works this way and actually gives an acceptable user experience for the kind of people who have shown up to this thread to show their dissatisfaction.

[vdqtp3]

Try this, go to Google and type in "eggzackly this".

Two results not containing "eggz" at all. Two results containing "eggzackly<punctuation>this" Two results containing "eggzackly" but missing "this".

Google Search is broken. It no longer does what it's directed, it just takes a guess. I suspect part of this is because someone decided that "no results found" was the worst possible result a search engine could give.

[BbzzbB]

Googling that with the brackets I get results containing "eggzackly this" ranked 3, 4, 6 (your comment) and 7 whereas the others contain just eggzackly (or with the 'this' preceded by punctuation as you mention).

Therefor I don't see how your last sentence is the explanation (there are results), I've also happened to land on no results found sometimes with overly precise quoted queries (for coding errors mostly IIRC). But it is annoying that it doesn't seem stricktly enforced even when you want it to.