ETA-As of 7:30 this evening, it appears that Exact Phrase is fixed.
After more research it appears that it the Google Exact Phrase Search problem seems to be related to certain Google Databases. Here is a blog entry from Nico’s Blog (I don’t know who Nico is, but the blog is very interesting) that explains it far better than I can.
Google: Exact Phrase Search No Longer Works
So a quick fix would be to stop using the Google toolbar and use one of the functioning IP Addresses listed in the above blog entry.
According to several readers, Google is aware and working on this problem.
Another way to find out which Google IP addresses are working is to use the amazing Google Watch Tool
This site allows you to enter Google using multiple IP addresses. For example, I searched my mythical prospect “Katherine E. Morrison” in all the Google Databases with the prefix 64.233 and they all came out with around 48 hits. When I used this tool to search Google databases where the last two numbers were .99 I found that
http://216.239.53.99/
http://216.239.57.99/
http://66.102.7.99/
All came up with about 12,900 hits for my mythical donor, most of which did not contain the donor’s name.
It is a very interesting tool, but mostly it is very useful for finding a Google entry point that will provide accurate results.
This may be a better workaround than the anonymouse!