How can you tell whether or not this is a google search issue or an internet landscape issue?
What finally pushed me away from Google was its incorrect assumption of equivalence between different terms. I'd search something like "printer scaling draftsight" and it would return results with "printer" "scaling" and "autocad" all in bold. Because autocad and draftsight are 2D CAD programs, and autocad is more popular, so suuurely that's what I wanted.
Yeah I've noticed this a lot in recent months/years. Have been finding myself putting most of the keywords of the query in quotation marks to get any kind of results relevant to my actual query. Like 'printer "scaling" "draftsight"' just so that G wouldn't make some stupid assumptions.
One page of results with 8 of 10 completely unrelated.
It interprets what it thinks I meant instead of listening to the actual words that came out of my mouth.
I have the same problem with my wife... :-)
Language is used to convey meaning. The difference between my wife and Google is that Google tries to interpret language in the lowest common denominator which leaves all people who try to use language properly feeling like they need to learn a new one just to be understood by their search engine.
...maybe that's not so different.
The internet is always going to be in constant flux: SEO trickery, the rise and fall of sites which contain the most relevant data, context of the search (browser -> phone), etc.
Google's main job is to make it as easy as possible for a user to find what they want. For example, as a techie, 15 years ago that might have meant making sure to constantly index usenet and various mailing lists. Today most of that content is at StackExchange, Github, Reddit, etc.
And it's not just tech searches - everyone will have their own niche which Google once got right and often returned as the very first result (when was the last time you were confident in using the 'lucky' result?), and now, not only do they not return relevant results, whatever they do return is mixed with tons of ads and (probably) paid results that aren't marked as ads.
The fact that Google doesn't yet pay dividends while the MBAs there are apparently intent on destroying the company's main product as fast as they can, doesn't bode well for their share price going forward.
Try searching for just the name of a supposed whistleblower, then add another term, and get all the censored results. Even more true in the news tab, which initially returned -0- results.