It should be optional somehow. Now if I do a web search with quotes, the quotes will disappear if I want to make a search for this phrase in blogs or news.

I'm not seeing it here on google.com, but Google UK is doing this.

There is a bug in it though, the pagination links don't work because they use the q GET parameter, which still has the quotes in it.

Google does not always display the warning.

Try this modification of the search replacing "have" with "hve".

   "i hve been using friendfeed irregularly over"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22i+hve+been+using+friendfeed+irregularly+over%22&btnG=Search

It produces one result. That result has "hve", but it does not have the above string. Google does not warn that its result does not have the string.

Google does offer to do the search with the correct spelling.

Separating the words with periods instead of wrapping them with quotation marks still works the same as before, and does not show any other results at this time.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=i.have.been.using.friendfeed.irregularly.over&btnG=Search

Looks like this behavior only happens in some rare circumstances, namely when the query
- is in quotes
- has no results
- triggers our spelling correction

which is pretty rare. I talked to someone here and I expect that a new push will change this by the end of next week. Thanks to pfr at Google for the quick analysis and being willing to push the change for this, by the way. :)

Great tip, I tried the same in Yahoo also, they do the same but we have to click an extra link to get the results without quotes. Here is one example.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Where%20can%20I%20find%2
0Monty%20Python%20DVDs%22&ei=UTF-8

Another "bug": if you don't close the quotes and there's no search result for your query, Google doesn't warn you that your query was slightly altered.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22how+to+eat+many+magic+mushrooms&btnG=Search

There's also a similar bug when you enter a single quote in a double quoted query:

["hello my name's frank and this is my partner jane"]
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22hello+my+name%27s+frank+and+this+is+my+partner+jane%22

I think that happens because there's a spelling suggestion.

Google shows a lot of inline suggestion that just remove your quotes, including some strange ones:

http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/6420/inlinesuggestionsxw7.png

[OT]
The characters in the image embedded in the previous post by Ionut Alex, Chitu are rendering with a variety of colors.
The linked image is normal.
I have tried this in two different browsers.
The blog software may be changing the colors in the image when it rescales it.

George, I think Ionut is using ClearType on his operating system, which the screenshot shows now. ClearType is an advanced form of anti-aliasing by Microsoft which renders certain certain colors for subpixels. Now the forum software simply asks the browser software to resize the image with whatever process the browser wants, which may cause additional moiree patterns. On my OS, I'm usually disabling ClearType (and my Firefox doesn't use normal anti-aliasing either on certain fonts).

How annoying. I've only noticed today that Google no longer assumes a closed quote at the end of a phrase opened by a quote. Bother.

Bob: That's not true. I found a case when it doesn't end the quote for you, but it's probably a bug: http://blogoscoped.com/forum/128108.html#id128305