Recently I have stopped using the plus sign in my Google searches. The reason is simple. The same results are given if the search is done without a plus sign.
If I search for
alvin trusty
there are 55,000 hits. If I search for
+alvin +trusty
there are also 55,000 hits. I imagine the Google database is so big it only makes sense to eliminate links that do not include all terms in the search criteria.
There seem to be some circumstances where the above doesn’t apply. If I search for
alvin trusty education
or
+alvin +trusty +education
I get the same number of hits… about 20,000. If I use use “edtech” instead of “education” in the above two searches, I get 584 hits and 23 hits respectively. Maybe the obligatory plus sign only kicks in if there are a limited number of hits.
Something more is going on. If I do a single word search, I get these numbers
alvin – 17.1 million
trusty – 4.7 million
edtech – 1.9 million
With the old way of thinking, my search including all three terms should give me a total approaching the sum of these three numbers. I am not sure how Google comes up with 584.
I still use quote marks around important strings of words or letters. Those still work as they always have. The plus sign can also be dropped from the quotes as is seems to be a given there too.