Yes. The amount of times I've seen Google return results with one or more terms removed alone is proof of that. In the old days, they at least tried to find rel

Yes. The amount of times I've seen Google return results with one or more terms removed alone is proof of that. In the old days, they at least tried to find relevant results when your query had no quotation marks around it. Now any remotely specialised query leaving them off will find half the page filled with irrelevant results labelled 'missing [term you actually cared about]'. Large sites certainly seem to be overrepresented in their results now too.