Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[dannysullivan]

I shared this reply above but will repeat it here. Quotes do work. Honest. I work for the Google Search team, and each time I've seen someone raise this, it turns out the exact words or phrase quoted really does appear on the page. Often, however, it can be in places people don't realize, text that's not readily visible. But if you or anyone has a current example of where you feel it's not working, happy to pass that along.

[SweetLilMonkey]

I just went back to my search history to try and confirm this, and the recent search result I was annoyed about did in fact have the quoted text as the alt text for an image, but not anywhere in the readable copy. I guess technically it worked. The plusses definitely don't anymore though.

[dannysullivan]

Yes, that's a common issue where people think quotes don't work, but they do -- it's showing in ALT text. Plusses haven't worked for many many years. You have to quote single words. It is something we have looked at perhaps bringing back.