It's just not true. Some years back (I think around 2017) I was showing to my colleagues how the phrase
"The magic of Google is gone"
in quotes brings a ton of irrelevant results, none of which contained the phrase or sometimes even any of the words (and no, it wasn't the suggested "results without quotes"). I also posted about it on an online forum which Google could at one point find as the only result, but now it's gone even though that page is still there, on the same forum. Today this phrase yields zero results and suggests some without quotes.
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.
Quotes searches bring back pages we can see have the quoted terms. That's how it is intended to work, and that's how does work. I've looked into many of these cases, we find the quoted terms there. In this example, we don't see any pages with that quoted phrase. If there is a page with it out on the web, like the forum post you mentioned, it might be that we no longer have the page in our index -- so we wouldn't match it. Do you recall the URL? It would help me look into that more.
I have a different example of Google not finding a page with "" that ought to be found. Assume I want to find https://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=18685, which is on a ~20 year old phpBB forum that is certainly indexed. The post is from 2012 after all. And I take one sentence from there and search for it, with quotes:
If I search without the quotes I get more results, but I think not the target thread.
Admittedly, this is not "" not working by showing pages that do not contain the target keyword. But it is "" failing by the search not properly searching its own index.
What's going on there? Why is the index of a rather stale 20 year old forum not complete? The site is indexed in general.
I don't see that particular page appearing to be indexed by us. If we don't have it indexed, we can't match it. Ideally, we'd index all the pages out on the web. But the web is really big.
You're still trying to gaslight HN users about this. Just ADMIT YOU and GOOGLE ARE WRONG.
Thread after thread of hundreds of people telling you your wrong and then you going "actually the community is wrong". Month after month, year after year, you pull this crap.
Admit it, Google search is worse now than it was before, and partly because they are abjectly failing at handling quotes.
It's not that it gets specifically deleted. We just don't have infinite space. There's always new pages coming along. Like trillions of pages out there. So we might not get back to revisiting a page and it falls out of our index while other content is added.
I could occasionally see irrelevant results for quoted searches until very recently, but I presume it's been fixed now.