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>Google is better at optimising itself for my query than I am trying to optimise my thoughts for google.

What, no. Not even close. That would require natural language processing & i doubt google even dreams of that.

Not really. It just means that when people type "How do I" in front of a search and then click on a link with how do i and then whatever it was, then google picked the right result, even though it doesn't know that you are asking for instructions on how to perform a task.

I took it to mean general queries. Anyway I often format my query for google & that gets me to the article much faster.

The people who click those haven't seen all the answers (that would be listed with a non-human query). I want the best answers, not the most popular ones.

Further, typing long phrases or questions unquoted gives a lot of false positives. I don't want that, I want to capture the essential minimum I need to look for something specific.

Google doesn't give you the best answers, they give you the last answer someone else chose. That's how google works, because google believes the best answer is the one after which the searcher does not click on anything else.

How would google measure a "best" answer?

What you're optimizing for in that case is hyperlinks to articles entitled "how do i...". This is probably an SEO technique by now.

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