[dannysullivan]

I was on vacation when this came up, so playing some catch up. I work for Google Search. I've been very involved with the concerns raised about quoted searches last year, especially because they never stopped working. They do work.

We did make an update last year to better reflect where quoted content appears on a page in the snippets we show. We did this because sometimes it's hard to find the quoted material on the page itself, leading to the "quotes don't work" issues.

This post explains more about this: https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...

The post also explains things like how with punctuation, we'll ignore that -- which leads to the "example.com" type of issue you might be having. If you're quoting a domain name, we're likely seeing that as "name com" rather than a request to just search within the domain. If you want to just search within the domain, that's what site: is for such as [site:example.com whatever you want to search for]