At the very least though, I would expect my search engine to rank results higher, if they contained the words I was looking for, without having to wrap in +"..." every single word. This seems to be something, that few search engines are capable of. Is this very basic thing labeled as "advanced" now?

That's how most search algos work out of the box. Google used to work that way. I agree; it's getting worse. It's not obvious if this is being done purposely but the result is that Google is basically unusable for a lot of searches now.

Google's moved to vector search, which doesn't lend itself to keyword prioritization in the same way classic keyword search does. I think that's 90% of the problem.

So finally I have a name for the utter madness that hit Google a decade ago?

Vector search is that the thing that makes it ignore my search query and search for something else?

Also, is this the problem Bing has?

And is it much much cheaper since they choose to use only use something so utterly ridiculously broken?

Edit: I'm obviously exaggerating heavily here but this has cost me so much time and frustration.

I agree with others: if pages exist that contains the exact matches why don't return them first?

Not bias, deliberate disappearance of specific categories of ideas. Independent blogs and forums not owned by large silicon valley companies have disappeared, for example. So have all discussions of current events, except for "mainstream" news publications.

Whether this is because of a short term greed motivation to maximize adsense yield or a larger conspiracy of global information control isn't clear yet. But it amounts to the same in practice.

Can you give examples of search queries, and blogs and forums that you would expect to show up from those queries?

Here’s an example on Google search:

‘site:4chan.org wuhan’ returns no results ‘site:4chan.org wuhan institute of virology’ returns 1,710 results