Don't even care about SEO fuckery, if the damn things would respect the search query.

Quotes, operands & other modifiers seem to have been straight up jettisoned.

Yep, Google decided it was too complicated and removed it all. Dont know how it was too complicated, people just wouldn’t use it if they didn’t know about it. They felt “natural language” would be more useful. Bullshit, I search for “foo and bar” it’ll return me results for foo and ignore the rest