Truly weird: for me, -california won't suppress the top result (a map of St Helena California) but adding -carolina and -california removes the map and puts the wikipedia page for St Helena (the saint person). In either case, using Tools -> Verbatim works better than "All Results"

Yeah they're not actually parsing your operators anymore. They're feeding the whole query to some machine learning model they trained and pulling "what you really meant" out of that.

It seems to me the map at the top ignores the minuses.

Do any regular web results show your - terms? I'm not seeing any in my testing.

Disclosure, I work at Google but not on anything related to this.

I also get different results, but I still get results with the words I don't want.