To be fair, + wasn't really doing much anyway. I found out the other day that Google's segmentation algorithm is so good that you don't even need to put spaces in your search; searching for "givemealistofsearchengines" does!
To be fair, I'm not a normal case, I started creating and querying full text retrieval systems for customers and myself in 1991 when I started my half-decade of document imaging work.
But I did use +, e.g. I'd do a query and get too many or the wrong results because one term wasn't being weighed well and then I'd add a + in front of it. Changing that to wrapping it in double quotes would be only an annoyance if the change wasn't entirely gratuitous (as I understand it) to the Google search function.
And, yeah, the segmentation algorithm is very good, although I haven't torture tested it ^_^.
(Side notes: LinkedIn is the only "social network" I'm likely to use in the foreseeable future, Facebook is anathema (they seem to have inverted your "don't be evil" motto) and Google+ is way too dangerous to use because being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts.)
being kicked off it kills the rest of your Google accounts
Where did you saw that? According to Horowitz (one of their VPs), it doesn't:
When an account is suspended for violating the Google+ common name
standards, access to Gmail or other products that don’t require a Google+
profile are not removed,
This would seem to be a change in policy, and "violating the Google+ common name standards" (which I would not have intended to do or likely have accidentally done) is certainly not the only way to get kicked off of it.
The more Google intertwingles their services the more cascading policy "failures" can put you in a world of hurt. Hence my one company, one service policy. In the case of Google (ignoring membership in some Google Groups, but to a non-Google address) it's Google Docs. (I'm not counting the non-sticky ones like search and Maps.)
