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Ah! This drives me insane and it's only started recently. I can enter as little as two words in format 'uncommonProperNoun commonNoun', and the entire first page will be results of 'missing uncommonProperNoun'. It's maddening. It's like searching for 'the moon' and getting results back containing 'the'. Does anyone know how/why this started? Is there a way to enforce a query?

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I think enclosing the word you really want in "quotes" forces Google to not discard that term.

I thought you were supposed to do "+ImportantWord LessImportantWord". Neither seems entirely reliable.

Google has a habit of silently breaking things that used to work, and as it's silent you don't know what the workaround is, even if you are so lucky as to have one.

The +ImportantWord syntax was recycled for Google Plus searches at some point and replaced with "ImportantWord". And now to get a "Important Set of Words" query to work, you now have to enter some special "Verbatim" mode by going into Search Tools and clicking on a special checkbox.

It does! And another trick that can be useful in these situations is gaps in quotes: "the * fox" will return (for me): "the main character, Simon Fox", "The Fabulous Fox", etc.

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