How's your experience with non-english searches?

Google has become unusable to search in a foreign language if you do not happen to be in a given country. It's trying to be too smart. It's ignoring double quotes, tld restriction still searches for the sites in a language of the country I'm in, etc... it's really frustrating at times.

Not to mention Google can't search anything old anymore. It's either news or spam. Or irrelevant "autocorrect". And it used to be so great with a little bit of effort. 10+ years ago that is.