> None of that ever worked properly, consistently, at google.

My experience is it worked pretty well on Google for a while, but then it got progressively worse.

Right, for this first 5 years or so, it worked. But then they started to optimize for “the masses”, and they don’t use boolean logic in queries.

They optimized for ad impressions. There was no technical reason not to keep around a Boolean mode - some competitors effectively exist because of that single feature.