I've noticed that phrase searches in Google (i.e. searches in "quotes") don't seem to work on pages listed as Supplemental Results.

It's quite hard to find examples, but compare these two:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=Bring+us+a+shrubbery%21+Purple+Monkey+Dishwasher+Penguin&btnG=Search

and

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22Bring+us+a+shrubbery%21+Purple+Monkey+Dishwasher+Penguin%21%22&btnG=Search

Has anyone else noticed this?
I've run into this "bug" more often than you might think, when trying to find obscure sites I've been to before. Often I do this by searching for an exact quote I remember from the page that is unlikely to exist anywhere else. But now I find Google returning zero results, even when the page does exist in it's index.

This one works just fine:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22Bring+us+a+shrubbery%21%22&btnG=Search

But adding another word returns no results.

So I assume there is something wrong with parsing exclamation mark inside quotes. Compare to this one:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22shrubbery%21+Purple%22&btnG=Search

"!" is ommited (subsituted by comma -> ",")

Piotr – I think the issues applies to results from Google's supplemental index only (these results say Supplemental Result in green beside the URL).

Here is another example:
(I'm sorry that the searches are so bizzare. It's hard to find pages in the Supplemental Index)

Results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=armistice+has+already+arrived+Irish+poet+Michael+Coady+playing+the+concertina&btnG=Search

No results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22armistice+has+already+arrived%22+Irish+poet+Michael+Coady+playing+the+concertina&btnG=Search

(Note that the exact phrase did appear in the top result of the search without quotes).

what really frustrates me is the way the operators "*" and "?" work: They have to be (or include) a space , or another charachter other than a-z.
Like if u search for "go?gle" , u will never find "google"! u'll rather find "gogle" or "go gle" .. i hate it..

I'd love to be able to search for e.g. "blog*ed" to find "Blogoscoped", "blogged", "Blogified" etc. But I imagine Google pondered this, and it turns out to be technically tough (or too CPU intensive). It's also possible only very advanced searchers would ever want this...