Unfortunately Google dropped + when they introduced Google+ social network. Nuff said Google+ is a ghost down nowadays but the + operator hasn't returned yet.

And even written "search term" doesn't work consistently anymore, Google thinks to know better and semi-randomly omit words and show results no one asked for.

Didn‘t they drop the + operator when they launched Google+? I thought now you have to surround your term with „“ instead of +?

Yes, you're right, they did this a looong time ago... BUT, sometimes Google still insists on showing you results that don't contain the word or phrase that you've explicitly requested must be in the results - utterly infuriating!

You now have to go into Search Settings -> Verbatim. Unfortunately you’d have to do this for each search session as it doesn’t persist.

In Chrome, I've set up Google Verbatim as a search engine and made that the default address bar search. Here is the URL format: {google:baseURL}search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}{google:searchFieldtrialParameter}{google:instantFieldTrialGroupParameter}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s&tbs=li:1

Especially when that word is 'not'.

Yeah, you are right; https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

They even dropped tilde :(

But you might be able to achieve the same things with their advanced search; https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en

That stopped some time and and it's now extremely frustrating as the main article describes. I'm sure I read that putting the search in quotes is like the old + but it doesn't seem to be, rather just priority to that search.

I feel this is more a case of Google thinking it knows better.

I have a similar problem with ebay, if I'm looking for an "HP Z430" then I'll get pages of other items where Z430 isn't even in the description.

I can see some value in searching for alternative spellings and related items but there should still be the ability to be exact in your search terms.