I've never been a google+ basher, but I really hated Google dropping the + search operator. It also showed me in a very personal way just how lazy users can be: Wrapping a word in double quotes is "just" 4 keystrokes instead of 1 for the + in front of it, but I effectively stopped using that feature after the change.
Matt Cutts gave some numbers about how often the + operator was used - and even then it was mostly used incorrectly.<p>> <i>> In the past, we provided users with the + operator to help you search for specific terms. However, we found that users typed the + operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly.</i><p><a href="http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html" rel="nofollow">http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your...</a><p>Check my math, but I think that means that + was used correctly in only 1 out of 600 searches.<p>People mention "power users". Google does not want power users. Google wants a mass market of people who see, and click, ads.<p>EDIT: i guess I need to say that I hated when Google changed the plus operator; and I find using Google now to be a frustrating and annoying experience. I'm shown results tha often are not relevant to my queries.<p>And Barrkel makes a good point about my confusing potentially misleading description of the times + is used correctly.
"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are buried in there somewhere.<p>Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine.<p>Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.<p>It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?
The Verbatim search option often isn't verbatim enough. Also it can't be combined with a time limited search; selecting "last month" clears the verbatim option :(
<i>>For example, a search for the word mars generates about 207 million matches. That would find pages that have the exact word plus pages that might not have the word but are deemed related to it.</i><p><i>>Searching for mars surrounded by quotes — “mars” — generates exactly the same number, even though that number should drop.</i><p>As far as I know, that number is just an estimate, and is wildly inaccurate for the actual amount of results. It's the same reason you could have a search with 10 pages of results shown at first, but after you get to page 3, you only see 4 pages of results. It just estimates it until in needs a more accurate count.<p>I can't find the original source for this, though I didn't spend much time looking, but found this on stackoverflow[0]:<p><i>>From a Google developer (Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team):</i><p><i>>"We try to be very clear that our results estimates are just that--estimates. In theory we could spend cycles on that aspect of our system, but in practice we have a lot of other things to work on, and more accurate results estimates is lower on the list than lots of other things"</i><p><i>[0] <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-count-and-estimate-the-number-of-a-search-results*" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4397292/how-does-google-c...</a><p>Edit:formatting
mars - 197m results<p>"mars" - 228m results<p>+mars - 19k results<p>+"mars" - 197m results<p>Assuming the estimated result count is at all meaningful, it looks like + still does have an effect: it turns ["x"] in to meaning the same thing as [x].
I don't see why that feature needed to change the normal + feature anyway. Couldn't they differentiate between it being at the start and in the middle? It'd be obvious for power users from the recommendations. That said I can see the argument for just supporting single word quotes and to me that seems more intuitive.
Did Google really name a feature after a P2P protocol? Coupled with the + symbol I initially thought this was about a file sharing protocol that G killed
Response from 'thisisnotatest' from Google search team [1]:<p>"I hear you. How to indicate to the user that we don't think there are any good matches for their query is something we debate and experiment with in search quality at Google."<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725958</a>
Lol... I never knew the + stopped working... I've been using it all along. I guess I always assumed the search term I was prepending a + to was always in there, somewhere. No doubt I was getting less relevant results.<p>Without a doubt, the '+' operator is the most important one, followed only by being able to search for a phrase surrounded by quotations.
I may be wrong, but I seem to remember using +word since the AltaVista days. I still do it, even though it doesn't work. (grumble)<p>That and the results changing as I type drive me nuts. It is quite common for me to see something I want only to lose it on the next keystroke which was already queued.
Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of the time.