That was always a lie. Always. Exact quotes were often disregarded, and even sometimes still aliased. What exists for precision is "verbatim", which was added after some bonehead a Google decided that the + operator, such as +needthisprecisely, was conflicting with "Google Plus" searches.

So they deprecated the + operator, and started blathering on about how quotes did "the same thing", which it never did, and never has!

If you want terms to appear as typed, the closest thing to the old + is "verbatim" under "tools" after a search. Verbatim was added back in, after people howled at the loss of the + operator.

Note the + referenced:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021515/http://www.google...

You can see that in 2004, Google never aliased terms, the ~ operator was for that.

(Everyone used + for "always include this", for any needed word, for almost 15 years before Google removed it.)