How funny that Google has come full circle and now requires that too. I'm sick of Google assuming I mean one thing when I mean another, but putting + in front of words ensures they are actually in the results.
Actually, now that I think about it, this might be something not particularly difficult to solve with greasemonkey...
Edit: Here's my attempt: http://github.com/paulbaumgart/GreasemonkeyScripts/blob/d88d...
Install by clicking the 'raw' link in the top right corner of the script.
Edit 2: Any thoughts on how to make the script run earlier, to avoid making two requests? It seems Greasemonkey doesn't actually support this, so it might have to be its own extension...
Press 'e' (for 'enforce') on any google search page to automatically add + to all search terms.
Another bugaboo of mine, though, is the fact that hyphenating words no longer acts the same as putting them in quotes. Searching for car-stereo used to be the equivalent of "car stereo" — one less character to type. Now Google ignores the hyphens.
(Yeah, this is a horrible example but I've had many instances of good ones, often relating to programming terms which then trigger off similarly spelled words..)
That Google searches ignore punctuation also irritates me. My wife's name is Harmony - also a fairly common word - so searches for her throw up masses of "...live in harmony. Aldridge also thought ..." which are irrelevant.
"Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried" - Winston Churchill.