My guess is that Google et al are all hell-bent on not telling you that your search returned zero results. They seem to go to great lengths to make sure that your results page has something on it by any means necessary, including: searching for synonyms for words I searched for instead of the specific words I chose, excluding words to increase the number of results (even though the words they exclude are usually the most important to the query), trying to figure out what it thinks I asked for instead of what I actually asked for.
I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).
I further suppose a lot of that is that The Masses(tm) don't use Google like I do. I put in key words for something I'm looking for. I suspect that The Masses(tm) type in vague questions full of typos that search engines have to try to parse into a meaningful search query. If you try to change your search engine to caters to The Masses(tm), then you're necessarily going to annoy the people that knew what they were doing, since the things that they knew how to do don't work like they used to (see also: Google removing the + and - operators).