If anything getting good information out of Google has become harder for us expert users because Google have tried to make it easier for everyone else.

The power-user tricks like "double quote phrase searches" and exclusion though -term are treated more as gentle guidelines now, because regular users aren't expected to figure them out.

There's always "verbatim" mode, though amusingly that appears to be almost entirely undocumented! I tried using Google to find the official documentation for that feature just now and couldn't do better than their 2011 blog entry introducing it: https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

Maybe if I was more skilled at Google I'd be able to use it to find documentation on its own features?