Google's search quality has taken a serious nosedive in the last couple of years - the last 6 months in particular.

I think they implemented some new form of search term widening which is far too strong, so the results you want are often buried among pages and pages of results for the general category of things that you searched for rather than close matches for your keywords. Combined with the recency bias that other people have talked about and you end up with a lot less useful search for precise searching.

This coincides with a large increase in the number of surveys that my partner has been getting through the Google Rewards program that ask whether or not a recently used search term gave relevant results. Obviously that's just anecdotal, but it does feel like there are substantial changes in the algorithm, and not necessarily for the better.