Google Stop Word Message Gone?

At SearchEngineLand, Barry noticed that Google is no longer alerting searchers that stop words are not searched. Previously, stop words in a query that was not in phrase marks would usually find Google prompting searchers that the stop word in the query is "a very common word and was not included in your search." Does this mean that Google no longer has any stop words? Based on a few of my tests with a small retrieval set, comparing a search with a stop word and another search with a + in front of the stop word, it does seem that Google will on occassion still ignore some stop words.

For example, as of today when I ran these searches, a search for epurea journal of got 103 unclusted records while adding the plus for epurea journal +of showed only 97 results. Shifting the word order, I found the same 103 with epurea of journal but got 98 results with epurea +of journal.