I miss it too, but it was the sharp end of the wedge in the dumbing-down of search query interpretation. Now they'll take every word of your query, find all th

I miss it too, but it was the sharp end of the wedge in the dumbing-down of search query interpretation. Now they'll take every word of your query, find all the synonyms, word-stem everything (think "kicked" -> "kick"), and search for that instead of what you typed. I know, some (the majority of) users don't know or care about the difference, and I'm glad that you can for now still enclose the things you mean verbatim in quotation marks, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that disappear.