Hi, My name is Steve Baker and I'm a Software Engineer in our search quality team here at Google. We take these types of complaints seriously and use them to debug the problem/brainstorm solutions.
For those of you who have been forced to use + or quotes to get google to return what you want, we would love if you would post the specific example queries on this thread. (Some people did, but a few of the complaints were vague.) Also, in general you can click the 'Dissatisfied? Help us improve' link in the footer of google search results pages to report problems. We check those out, but if you wanted to include the word "hackernews" in the info you submit, that would let us see all your reports easily.
For those of you who have been forced to use + or quotes to get google to return what you want, we would love if you would post the specific example queries on this thread. (Some people did, but a few of the complaints were vague.) Also, in general you can click the 'Dissatisfied? Help us improve' link in the footer of google search results pages to report problems. We check those out, but if you wanted to include the word "hackernews" in the info you submit, that would let us see all your reports easily.