I'd prefer to recognise immediately that there are no results & reframe my query that to start to scan down through the results, maybe click into one & start to read only _then_ to realise it doesn't relate, back to Google — "oh, they didn't actually search for what I told them to search for" & then reach the same point they could've given me at the start.

At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)

> At least there should be a checkbox for "make a best guess when limited results" / "give me my exact search query" (maybe there is somewhere & I've missed this)

There is, one of the drop-downs gives you the option of "all results" or "verbatim".

It doesn't actually work, of course.

Google's search index of the web of 2021 sucks. Getting two search results which match the exact terms I got is no longer particularly strong evidence that those were the only pages with those terms, and quite a few times I've had it fail to find pages which do exist and should have matched the search I did.