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Noticed this as well. I've gotten so frustrated with poor results for things I need, I've been using "Verbatim" mode to force Google to stop interpreting my terms. This was a pain, so ended up installing an extension that forces verbatim on every search.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verbatim-search/oc...

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Recently, I searched "(-)-BPAP" -- with the quotes -- looking for the chemical benzofuranylpropylaminopentane, which is typically referred to as (-)-BPAP. EVERY result was for a BiPAP ventilator.

So I tried verbatim. It still didn't work.

Verbatim + quotation marks. Still nothing.

I guess New Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term. But this is characteristic of its recent performance. I can't even count the number of times Google disregarded part of my search term and gave me an inane result.

Per the grandparent comment: "Young people often use full sentences today because that is what works."

Searching "BPAP chemical", "BPAP chemistry", etc. seems to work fine.

> Google Search simply doesn't recognize the "(-)-" part of the search term.

AFAIK, Google search has always ignored parentheses and most punctuation symbols (other than ones that are special to it, like +require_term -exclude_term "...")

https://support.google.com/websearch/thread/71287971/does-go...

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