I use Verbatim mode by default, trying to basically get back what Google used to be. In my opinion, if there genuinely are no results anywhere on the web that exactly match my phrasing, this is actually useful information.
Sometimes this does result in much fewer results than I would expect though. Out of curiosity, I tried flipping on the Programming Lens, and lo and behold there were in fact results for my verbatim query, with my verbatim search phrases present in the documents.
This is surprising. My expectation is that Lenses narrow results from the universal pool, but it seems like they just use a different index altogether. I don't like the idea of having to explicitly select a topic for every query to ensure I'm not missing potential hits.
Possibly related, it also seems that Lenses don't always respect Verbatim mode, as I have found results with Lenses on which did not contain my verbatim terms. At first I thought this might explain the above discrepancy. However, I do also find that exact verbatim matches are found with Lenses on which are not found with Lenses off.
