Did google broad search become exact search by default?

For example I searched

broad - 161,000 for keyword

phrase - 2,730,000 for "keyword"

exact - 161,000 for [keyword]

In this situation there is way more phrase results in quotes than broad/exact.
I wonder what that says about the phrase in this sort of situation... easier to rank for or harder... Maybe that means it is more commonly used in combination with other words rather than on it's own.

Which is making me rethink how I should be looking at my niche market research.

So if google has done away with broad, does that change how we should look at niche research?

I've seen keywords in " have more results than "-less ones them before. It's just google screwing with you. You can't see those 100k results anyway, they can do whatever they want , seriously, I think some kind of mechanism kicks in when you do a different kind of search. Broad search becoming exact wouldnt make much sense. I wouldn't be suprised if somewhere along the line they just become the equivalent of the microsoft paperclip however. They're already categorically ignoring the "misspellings" of keywords eventhough they are legitimate bleeding keywords. I remember searching for that pulp fiction parody porn flick, think it was "pump fiction", I'd see a porn flick like that, it had some badass black dude and a hotass white chick, the dialogue must be hillarious, anyways, it was just some banner though and I couldn't even click on it or someting, so I go to ye old faithfule google and what do I get as a top result? yes, the original pulp fiction on the imdb. just how many times was the word pump mentioned on that site? i wonder. That's what's happening to google search. And I'm not even ranting about how it's hurting our marketing economy. It's slowly becoming the search engine for the retards and made by the retards. Hello, microsoft paperclip.