Here is the tweet shared by Matt Cutts –
@Go_Marcus @DatGuyGabe librarians too. But the feature didn’t get much usage at all, yet took up indexing space we could use for more pages.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 27, 2013
For those, who don’t know what this tilde ~ operator did, here is a short explanation-
The tilde ~ operator when used with keywords on Google returned synonyms of the searched word. This helped web marketers and search engine optimizers to find out synonyms and increase the keyword base.
Also See:-