You are aware they removed this, right?

https://searchengineland.com/google-sunsets-search-operator-...

Try it yourself, it does JACK SHIT - they still show me what they'd prefer I have searched for.

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Edit - ok, I'm guessing you are, since on the second read I see you're joking about the google plus timing. I don't understand how that makes this better? Tooling is being stripped away in favor of showing me "popular search content" that google would prefer I see, and ads...

I'm not saying it makes anything better, I'm saying that Google has always been able to return results that don't include the search terms, that's why the '+' force inclusion operator existed. It is not a new phenomena for Google to return results that don't contain keywords, since one of the defining features of Google vs Excite/Lycos/AltaVista et al is that it wasn't a simple TFIDF (textual frequency inverse document frequency) search, many of the older search engines used a variant of that. PageRank, even in Google 1.0, probably allowed a very low ranked TFIDF result (doesn't include most of the query) to be boosted, although I'm just speculating.

I'm just saying, in the same theme of my original 'young whippersnappers' post, that a lot of things people are saying is new behavior is in fact, old behavior with a different UX.