On: The + operator has been replaced.

[joe_the_user]

Indeed,

Also, I know from considerable experience that the plus operator had a distinct meaning from the quotes operator so this change definitely implies that Google queries will be less fine-grained no matter what quotes means now.

Yes, Google is worse and worse for anything technical.

Alternatives anyone?

[DanBC → joe_the_user]

DuckDuckGo, (http://duckduckgo.com/) especially with the !bang syntax.

Not an alternative, but BlindSearch (http://blindsearch.fejus.com/) is interesting.

[sp332 → joe_the_user]

If you want something more fine-grained, blekko claims to filter results by category. e.g. "select /programming" https://blekko.com/ws/select+/programming will return results for "select" in the "programming" category.

[Sindisil → joe_the_user]

bing, perhaps?

I intend to give it a shot. Seems there's some reasonably powerful query syntax: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx.

[wanorris → Sindisil]

My complaint about Bing for technical querying is that when I tell them I want an exact phrase by wrapping it with quotes, it doesn't always believe me that I really do want that phrase to appear in the result page.

Some of those other operators look promising, though. I'll have to try them out.

[nhebb → Sindisil]

The "near:" operator looks very useful.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795615.aspx

[tristanperry → joe_the_user]

Bing, DDG and Blekko IMO; naturally Bing have the largest index of the 3.

[cpeterso → joe_the_user]

Someone needs to write a Firefox Add-on that automatically quotes your Google search terms (unless you are quoting a phrase).

[electrotype → cpeterso]

Here's a Greasemonkey script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/116080

It doesn't work with Google Instant enabled.

May need improvements!