Used to be if you included "term" or -"term" you'd only get results that did/n't include those terms. But it seems Google has gone all in on the "I don't think you really meant that" approach [], and the hard filters have become suggestions at best.
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[] Ok, I know it's probably because they're switching more and more to semantic search and ML, but they could retain the hard filters on top.
As an example, if I search for 'gilbert gottfried' and set the date filter 1 apr -> 3 apr, I still see stories about his death.
The issue is that "power users" that are even aware of quotes and and hard filtering are now the long tail that google is no longer optimizing for. They'd much rather focus on the 99% of searches by, for lack of a better term, normies, and as a consequence, rather than expecting users to learn to think, their search features and performance are regressing toward a totally dumbed down mean. And I think society is worse for it.
It's extremely frustrating how much "content" is displayed on the page versus how much is hidden in the page source.