Does anyone know of a search program, similar to Google or Bing, that will return hits only on what I tell it to search for?
And if there isn’t one, why not?
Unclear.
How do you know it gave you something you didn’t search for? Did you look at all 484,000,000 results? Hmmm?
You know you can use quotes and things like AND and NOT to at least get more relevant stuff to the top, right?
You can try making Google more precise by surrounding your search in quotes, like:
Apple bee
vs
"Apple bee"
There isn’t one because internet search companies are there to make money, not to provide a public good, and over time they realized that most people don’t really mean what they say when they type something into search, so it’s better to guess for them. That pisses off power users, but most people aren’t power users. In the old days, this was pretty much how the search engines worked, allowing exact queries and complex booleans (and/or), etc., but those features fill into disuse after a couple decades of Google’s supremacy. You can try shouting, but nobody cares. You’re just another advertisee out of billions, sadly.
That said, though, there are some sector-specific search engines (academia, books, products, etc.) that might be better than general Google for a certain thing. What are you looking for?
Note about the use of quote marks. If you want individual words to match exactly and not match synonyms, put each word in their own set of quote marks. This will also make it require that word to be in each hit. For example: A search on
Saskatchewan roundabout jamboree
could produce hits on pages with only Saskatchewan and jamboree but not roundabout. Or even pages with synonyms such as Ontario[sup]1[/sup], traffic circle, and/or festival. Putting the whole string in a single set of quotes will only hit pages with that exact phrase. So you probably want to do this:
“Saskatchewan” “roundabout” “jamboree”
to get pages with those exact words anywhere on the page.
[sup]1[/sup] Seriously, Google search thinks Ontario is a synonym of Saskatchewan, although as far as I can tell, not the other way around.
There is no magic way of getting Google to respond to exact queries.
It tries to “help” in so many ways. Grrr.
But if I type in 3 words I want only pages with those 3 words. If there only 4 hits, thanks. If there are none, well, now I know.
But Google ranks the words in some odd fashion and if there’s a lot of page with the two “best” ones but not the 3rd, they’re going to feed you misleading stuff.
The options of “verbatim” and putting things in quotes have a nearly negligible effect.
Long ago a “+” sign in front of a term indicated it was a must-have. But they decided they needed that for things involving Google+ so it went away. But even before that it was treated as a tiny hint. And with Google+ gone don’t expect it to come back.
When all else fails, try DuckDuckGo.
Maybe you don’t actually want a search engine. What is the type of query you are asking?
I see what you did there… I think. 
Ain’t ever going to happen. First, deciding what you want to search for is tough. Second, sites can use meta tags to give a search engine hints about what is in there. The tags can be used to draw more hits even if the tag has nothing to do with the content.
And of course your engine would not be funded by advertising, since advertisers don’t really care what you search for. Type in a search for “1920s Death Ray” and you will not doubt get a hit telling you that you can find the best 1920 Death Rays at Target.
I really need one of those. Can you tell me what isle it is on?
The very first thing I was taught about information retrieval was that you can have precision (only what you say you want) or relevance (everything that might be what you say you want), but you can’t ever have both. Either you miss something that is actually what you want but somehow doesn’t match your search terms, or you get a lot of extraneous stuff that isn’t what you want. There’s a sort of curve between the two extremes.
Different search engines have different operators to help refine your search: say, not just quotes for an exact phrase but + (=must include) and - (=must exclude). You can do a fair bit of fiddling to get close, but you’re never going to get exactly what you want and only what you want.
If the input is:
“red white”
And the first page of responses includes:
Red-White
Red White
Red, White
RED, WHITE
It’s quite obviously giving me things I didn’t ask for.
Devil’s Isle, I think.
AltaVista used to do what you’re describing.
But it turns out that giving people what they want is a lot more successful than giving them what they think they want, and there’s a larger divide between those two than you’d expect.