Death of the (+) in web search

Many years ago, search engines supported using a (+) symbol next to terms that you definitely want to be on the resulting pages. This is similar to how using the (-) symbol before a term omits pages that contain that term.

I’ll use a search string I was using recently to illustrate:

• Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus (normal search)

• Does diatomaceous earth kill +aspergillus (the word “aspergillosis” is required in search results)

• Does diatomaceous earth kill aspergillus -bacteria (same search but exclude pages with the word “bacteria” on them)

In June of 2011, Google launched Google Plus. In October, they removed the (+) symbol as a search modifier so that it could be used for Google Plus.

However, I recently discovered that it’s been replaced by using double quotes! When you quote a word or phrase, it not only searches for that word or phrase, but it mandates that it exists in search results.

So, let’s compare two searches. For this search, I only care about pages that contain both “d…