Thank you, that's a helpful tip! I used to use many modifiers for my Google queries, but Google dropped support for many of them, and doesn't seem to document comprehensively what they actually support from day to day.

I wish excluded keywords were the only frustration. Their index seems to have gotten considerably worse at dealing with any somewhat "long-tail" query. I'm not sure why.

I suspect they've won the spam battle by aggressively purging from their index, but in doing so they've lost the spam war because the false positive rate on their approach is way too high. Or maybe I'm completely off base.

My favorite modifier removal: Currently, you can use - to exclude keywords. Once upon a time, you could use + to require a keyword... until Google+ came out, and + became how you would search for people's profiles.

sigh

This. I can't believe someone approved removing the use of "+" as a search operator. It was at the very core of searching Google. It took months before I found out you needed to double-quote "every" "single" "damn" "individual" "word" to force searching by inclusion.

I think the day Google nerfed search for the sake of Plus was the day they jumped the proverbial shark. At least for me, that was when I stopped thinking Google could do no wrong. Then they nixed Reader.

Bing still honors the + operator, thankfully. I find it occasionally useful.

Essential, but inexplicably strips non alphanumerics.

Not so much inexplicably. This is common to nearly every indexing system intended to support text search. You won't see punctuation characters being indexed by most systems. Tokenization, lexeme normalization, and all that. It does make certain searches nearly impossible to perform, but the case is rare enough that the average person - even amongst developers - doesn't get stuck all that often.

Just tried this with "c++" and the results look like it searched for c++ and not c.