Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not for many of us at least. Has't worked reliably for me and a number of others for close to a decade I think (the first blog post I know of that mention it is from 2011 or 2013 I think.) Oh, and I think it is the same thing as others mention in this discussion: infantilization and "we know better than you". But being Google it might also be just general lack of care.
i believe there's a setting somewhere to enable verbatim search, but yeah google has steadily been getting worse
I remember now that you can prefix your search with
allintext:
Which of course is way more obscure than + and given that nobody has mentioned it thus far on THIS site, you know it's way too obscure for the public.
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html...