Doesn't the comment right below the one you linked successfully refute Danny Sullivan's claim?
Looking at the source of the cached page,
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sRJX_e...
It contains
<a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-quotes">don-t-give-up-quotes</a>,
<a href="/quotes/tag/don-t-give-up-the-fight">don-t-give-up-the-fight</a>,
After you eliminate HTML, that becomes "don-t-give-up-quotes, don-t-give-up-the-fight" and since punctuation is stripped, that matches.Full disclosure I work at Google, but not on Search.