What "Google getting better" actually means is that it is more likely to return what most people want as the first page hits. That is a tradeoff, because it obscures everything else whenever what most people want is wrong.

As a programmer, you're only going to be doing searches for things that are non-obvious, so there is a vastly higher chance of Google giving you the wrong answer than for the average search.

There is a fundamental contradiction between a search engine that tries to show you only what it thinks you want, and the fact that you don't know exactly what you want when you search, until you see some results.

I think there's something like a conservation law, that the more you make it easy to find some things on the Internet, the harder you make it to find others. Kind of like the proof that you can't compress all strings.