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I always use quotes when posting error messages into Google as I always get better results that way. Why does their tool work this way? I personally don't care, I'm just trying to use their black box of magic as best I can to get things done.

Quotes are indeed still respected by Google: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

For example, this search without quotes doesn't mention Dennis Ritchie's NYTimes obituary on the first page of results:

https://www.google.com/search?q=became+more+interested+in+co...

Add quotes and the obituary becomes the first result:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22became+more+interested+in...

That's not what people mean when they say "not respected by Google".

They're not saying quotes never work, they're saying sometimes you use quotes and google returns a page that doesn't include the quoted word.

If you are searching a commandline argument, such as "gcc -g", you are probably not going to find ANYTHING useful at all. Why? Because the minus sign (-) means exclusion! Same thing applies for lots of other symbols that may appear in the output of a computer program. Using quotes largely solve the problem.