Today's 0.5% is tomorrows 95.5%. It just takes time.
It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else.
Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision.
Actually, usage of the + operator has been in steady decline for years. With Altavista you had to use + to require a word. When I started at Google, many many more queries had tons of pluses.
Google's demographic was much more tech-savvy in the early years, but as we've struck partnerships with companies like AOL, the population of people searching on Google has become broader. I don't believe that 95.5% of users will be searching with + or double-quotes any time soon. But for the power users like people on HN, they now have an extra option that allows better slicing/dicing of search results.
I don't think there is any motivation for people at large to become more "tech-savvy". It's rather the case of machines becoming more human-savvy.. and I don't really see anything wrong with that.
Machines becoming more human-savvy is a slow and difficult process.
And people are generally impatient. They want things to work. Sooner rather than later. They want immediate results.
Whereas if someone has the interest, I can teach them a few tricks and make them incrementally more "tech-savvy" in a few minutes. They will see the results immediately.
The more "technical" life becomes, the more it stands to reason that more people will have an interest in becoming at least a little more "tech-savvy".
I definitely agree with you that it's probably faster to teach a single individual with a mild interest in becoming more techie than, for example, change an industry standard for search engines. But I'm talking about entire populations of humans and machines.
Changing an entire population of computer software/hardware is a far easier and faster process than changing the entire population of humans. We're much more stubborn creatures than we'd like to believe, plus we also have a longer lifespan thus making any dramatic cultural changes (techie or otherwise) a more or less generational thing. On the other hand, just look at how fast something like cell phones or the internet is changing on what now seems like a monthly basis.
People will always do the same things they've always enjoyed doing: eat at restaurants, socialize with friends, play games, listen to music... but in what way technology is involved with those activities will only be affected by how fast the technology can change to become more human-friendly, not the other way around.
But here has Google has really made anything more human-friendly? They've simply removed a standard boolean operator in database search syntaxes because they noticed people were not using it (did people even know it existed?), or using it incorrectly. Does this make search more human-friendly somehow?
It certainly makes easy-to-type, using known standard operators, boolean searches more troublesome.
And the reason they have removed this operator?
Marketing. For something having nothing to do with search.
Oh I wasn't really commenting on Google's decision and whether it was right or wrong. Like you said before: "Time will tell". I was just offering an alternate view to your expressed optimism that Google's demographic (aka everybody) is becoming more tech savvy.
It is the so-called power users who lead the way for everyone else.
Doing away with a traditional boolean operator for the sake of marketing (of a copycat "social network" website no less) is not the sign of a company with a clear, intelligent vision.
But time will tell who is the wiser.