That verbatim option looks like it might be a way to largely bring back the old Google which tended to work quite well for me (except that modern SEO spam means we can probably never have the old Google again).

I’ve been pissed off with Google for (10+?) years now, ever since it became apparent to me that they changed their search from returning what you queried to some kind of fuzzy guess at what they think you’re looking for (probably based on what average, ie, non technical, people look for).

Possibly that verbatim option puts it back to what used to work pretty well for me, but because they changed it without really saying and then made the option for the old behaviour hidden away with an obtuse name, I had no idea about it until reading this article and had largely written them off as being more interested in showing adverts than what I was actually looking for.

Once I discovered that ChatGPT and similar are almost always way better at finding what I was actually looking for than Google ever was, Google is now very far from my first choice of search service.

It also helps that LLMs tend to be very good at helping you find the correct term, project, technology name, etc, for something when you’re not sure up front of what term to search for exactly.