It seems to me that they achieve this by increasing the relevance of common, often made searches at the expense of rare specialized ones. Google used to be very good for special narrow searches on technical topics.

Lately when I search for something like "recipe for borgelnuski" I get a page of links to sites with names like "Molly and Audrey" that first tell you a long story about their grandmothers pet kangaroo, then go through a very long a tedious explanations about ingredients, then vaguely go through the recipe step by step with a lot of pictures, but if you don't mind scrolling for 20 or 30 minutes, you get a very good recipe for borgelnuski.

It seems that when I do a narrow technical search lately, I get a page of links about funeral homes and insurance companies in Haskell, Texas.