Actually I think it's useful to google whole questions - for forum thread titles. The problem of course is that Google does not search for the whole thing and wrapping it in quotes makes it useless as well.
Asterisks within quotes still seem to work. I use those when I have a good idea of what string I’m looking for but I’m not sure about some words or want to find posts where someone (for whatever weird reason) apparently typed in or pasted an error in chunks.