Could you not add a hacker mode? Put it at google.com/h or something and remove all the cuddly fuzziness that drives us power users completely mad. I'm sure your intentions are good and that the latest changes are helpful for many or most users. But I for one have always enjoyed Googles assumption that the user is intelligent and therefore never autocorrected me, countrary to for instance MS office. Suggesting corrections does not interrupt my flow and are generally helpful. Auto-corrections are in great part highly disruptive for me. Please don't deviate from this very sound principle, at least not for us power users.
I think of this literal mode as pretty close to the hacker mode. Most of the time our query rewriting is an improvement, but we wanted it to be very quick (just a couple clicks) to go into hacker mode if we get things wrong.
My hunch is that someone could a search shortcut for verbatim mode, but if you used it enough you'd find that you missed the query improvements.
Can I enable literal mode permanently with a cookie? Otherwise, you better make sure that going into literal mode is fewer clicks than, say, going to DuckDuckGo.
