As I recall, not quite. + was an exact match. I believe it also precluded stemming; thus the ~ operator, when you wanted stemming (stemming: Not just "wonder

As I recall, not quite. + was an exact match. I believe it also precluded stemming; thus the ~ operator, when you wanted stemming (stemming: Not just "wonder", but also "wondering", "wondered", "wonderful", ...). + designated "must be in result". With double quotes -- this may be part of or in kind with other changes made to by Google to search results matching -- Google insists and becomes more aggressive at including results that don't include all the specified terms. Sort of a forced default "Did you mean..." inclusion that many find has come to clutter search results to the point of being unusable. There are some other aspects, I believe, that I'm not recalling right now. My experience seems to mirror others': I know what I'm looking for. I may well even have seen it, months or even years ago -- my memory's pretty decent, in such matters. Yet I can no longer get Google to cough it up in a search result -- or, it's on page 15 or 20. Despite my focusing my search terms to try to target it. There are other factors in this degradation. But, to the best of my recollection, the loss of the + operator was a significant factor.