I understand Google is trying to be clever here and appealing to novices who don't really understand what they want.
But my point is that for those of us that do it is an incredibly annoying "feature". Feature is in quotes because in the specific case above they didn't find semantic equivalents. They just dropped the "webhcat" term entirely.
Not touching that with a 10 foot pole... (just teasing, just teasing...)
But seriously, it sounds like what you want is a keyword matching engine. Google, for better or worse, has decided they know enough about their user's searches that they don't mind modifying the query parameter in an attempt to retrieve what people want rather than what they literally say they want.
I understand that you don't feel they're serving your needs any longer, and that can be frustrating. I think, however, that you can preceded mandatory terms with a + sign to require it to be present on page.
http://waxy.org/2011/10/google_kills_its_other_plus/ https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/3oI...
"singer" "song" -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" "last modified" "parent directory" "description" "size" "m4a"|"mp3"|"ogg"|"flac"
to search for songs. Too many quotation marks!
original, unmodified: http://lifehacker.com/207672/turn-google-into-your-own-perso...
That was my first reaction too, but I tried it out and it still doesn't work. In fact, the result is kinda funny:
Googling "webhcat primary key" got me 3 results with "webhcat" on the first page.
Googling "+webhcat primary key" got me 5 results in total, none of which contains the word "webhcat".
https://www.google.com/search?q=webhcat+primary+key&tbs=li:1
Unfortunately, now when I search <webhcat primary key> in verbatim mode, the top three results are some dude complaining about Google on HN. :D