People don't often need a power search. But when you do, you really want it to work.

Google gets ad clicks by building a brand, they want us to associate them with "competent to handle all my search needs." This is why Ford and Dodge make stock cars, not because they want to sell them on a mass market, but because they want to convince people the brand is capable of excelling beyond their needs.

UPDATE: I think you're right about Google's rationale, I just think execs are missing some counterarguments.

That was part of the draw of switching to Google way back when. If you had a more challenging search to pull off, you used Google, and eventually it became a habit to just visit Google in the first place.

Now I'm starting to try DDG when Google frustrates me. I also don't need 'Google Power' for a lot of my searches.

It's probably a good thing they're implementing these changes. It makes it easier for an underdog to come in and disrupt their core business, introducing some healthy competition.

Matt Cutts obviously isn't stupid, but that's a very stupid thing to say, or think, or act upon.

Many things are done rarely, that are extremely useful or important.

Hey, most search strings probably represent "less than half a percent" of all possible searches; so by that metric they could drop most of their index, and only answer the most frequent searches...

Let's not forget how large an audience any Google feature has, though. + being used correctly, even by 0.33% of users, is still probably a million people.

Still, I am surprised that Google has made search so poor for so many people in some situations. Although I understand they've done some work on making programming code easier to search for?

Anyway, losing mindshare among power users is very dangerous in the IT business. Even when you really just care about the average Joe.

Absolutely. And Google have been stumbling hard the past 2-3 years.

but in this case, it probably just means that people were using it like "cookies+cream". they aren't using + as an operator, they're using it as a synonym for "and", and they are better served by google parsing their query as native language instead of parsing it as an expression in a rarely used query language.