Late last week Google changed the way one of their most useful (but lesser known) search operators works: The + (plus) operator. What's that mean for you? Next time you want to make sure any single word or phrase appears in your search results, wrap it in quotation marks. Here's a bit more detail:
When you enter a search into Google, the search engine doesn't just search for all the web pages containing your search terms; instead, it returns what it thinks is the best match based on hundreds of factors, and the resulting page may not even contain one or more of your search terms. To explicitly specify that you want the results to include a word, you used to be able to add the + (plus) operator to the front of a term (e.g., +hackintosh +lifehacker would ensure both terms were in all results). Now, rather than adding the + operator, you need to wrap the word or words in quotation marks (e.g., "hackintosh" "lifehacker"). (Most likely this change has something to do with Google+ and it's +mentioning convention.)
It may seem like a trivial operator, but if you've recently done a search for two obscure keywords, you've probably noticed that often, Google returns results that only contain one of the words?particularly if there aren't a lot of pages that actually do contain both words. You're a smart searcher, though, so when you entered both terms, you actually wanted the results to contain those words. In the past, you'd add the + operator to all words you wanted explicitly included in results. Now it's the double-quote.
You likely already knew that quoting a phrase would return results with that exact phrase, but it's also now the go-to for must-include single-word terms, as well.
via Google Operating System
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