I use search at home, when going out, at home, everywhere. And in every different context I have very different expectations. Precisely sharp results for anything in my domain of expertise, blurry and "good enough" results for generic searches, multilingual results for broadly relevant searches, very local results for everyday related searches. And these expectations might change depending on any random factor.
I don't think google can weasel out what I want in what context. And I don't feel like adjusting dozens of options everytime I do a different kind of search.
Before google started making search smarter, the burden was on my shoulder to do the work to get relevant results for my queries. Now that the algorithms do more and more assumptions, I get to fight with it more and more, and before the blame lies on my search skills, it goes to google for making it hard.
My solution was to use separate engines (including multiple instance of the same ones, like ncr, US only, jp only etc), but a fast a dumb engine is really the way to go.