This seems like a big piece of news.
When you try to use the operator + (meaning, give me the exact term), you now get this message:
The + operator has been replaced. To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks
The help page reflects the changes.
It has been somewhat awkward that Google introduced Google-Plus and their PLUS operator meant something different. (Can we expect the PLUS to come back as an operator to search Google-Plus? That would be nice.)
For now, this creates a bit of inconvenience for us. We can use quotation marks around a word but that’s more typing.
In the cases where we misspell a word – or search for a word that is rare but spells like a well known word – we can expect Google to inform us of searches of the word variations. (Then it’s another click if you did mean to misspell it.) In most cases Google now not only varies the word (“auto-stemming“) but in fact goes for synonyms without us asking for that with the ~ operator (also gone from the list!). So now we can only control the search for a particular word with the quotation marks. As a slow typer, I don’t like that.
This also throws off lots of documentation, tutorials and help pages – including mine.
On a more technical note, you can still add “&nfpr=1“ to the end of your search query’s URL to prevent Google from second-guessing.
