Google has recently removed the plus operator from the list of operators in it search engine. The “+” operator previously was used to return results with exact match to the words or phrases. According to Google, people don’t use the “+” operator enough and doesn’t bring good results. Now you get lots of rubbish results while you try to use the “+” operator. You’re lucky to find what you want on the first few pages.
Google has released a Verbatim tool to allow users to find the exact match for the users, where the Google uses all your keywords to find exact keywords without making any spelling corrections or synonyms. You will have to enable this tool to return search results with your matching keywords. The verbatim tool is available on your left side bar under More search tools.
Learn more about the Verbatim tool here:
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=1734130
This however can be Google’s move to stop spammers from finding relative links using this operator. Spammers have been using this operator to find blogs, forums and sites where they can spam or gather emails or other information. Other users assume that this move is to replace the symbol for other purpose namely google + which hasn’t been doing well to root people off from facebook.
This is a terrible decision from google as many people use the + operator to find the best results in the first page rather then going through to whole list of results that the google finds. The regular use of keywords used generate random results and these operators were used to generate more accurate results from google. And with this move it makes you wonder that Google doesn’ t think so much as to help the internet users but itself.
You can still use to double quotes (” “) as an operator on your search keywords or user the verbatim to search for results with exact match with your keywords.
