Force Google search to require terms by default?

Question

Google used to "+" each term by default, but lately I keep stumbling on pages that are omitting one of my search terms. Perhaps they've recently tweaked the engine for relevance?

I know the content can change between their indexing and my viewing, but I've suddenly run into this problem a lot recently. If I go back and "+" each term, it knows I'm serious about it and rejects the errant result for the next search.

Is there a default setting to change it back to absolutely require each search term?

I don't want to add extra characters to my search query, just tick a box or something to make it work like it used to.

Answer 1

Sometimes if the term isn't in the page it may be in a page that is referencing that page. If you view the cached version it will report on that. That may be what is going on.

At a test to see that it is doing an AND (just maybe with words that are not there) vs. an OR (what was previously the standard) is to look at your result count as you add or remove words. It used to be that as you added words you got more results because it included pages that included any words. If you try this with Google you will see that the number of results changes inversely as you add and remove words.

Answer 2

From Google search basics: More search help:

A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word 'overhead.'

Another search example is "loopback 127.0.0.1 snuffleupagus". The first link is a wikipedia article with absolutely nothing about snuffleupagus. Only "+loopback +127.0.0.1 +snuffleupagus" will bring up relevant links.

[status-bydesign], apparently.