Google Kills Its Other Plus, and How to Bring It Back | Epicenter | Wired.com:

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing โ€œplusโ€: the operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since.


So how many stupid searches have I run since October of last year? It didn't seem to be working... guess I should listen to my intuition more closely.