There's not nearly enough discussion in this thread about Google's Verbatim mode (Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim).

In my experience turning this on substantially increases the quality of Google's search results. It stops ignoring half the words in your query and seemingly parses "quoted" phases as you'd expect. The biggest problem is that there is no ability to turn this on all the time for your account and turning it on is intentionally a hassle.

Google still has a lot of other problems even with Verbatim enabled, but this makes Google like 30% less terrible even if just using it for site:reddit.com-like searches.