[pteraspidomorph]

I suspect Google Search can no longer function as well as it once did without being informed by everything Google knows about you (malicious use of SEO might very well be the reason). You could try fiddling with the privacy settings in your account, especially if you blocked anything (edit: or remove privacy protections from your web browser), and see if that makes it better. I just use DDG for most things these days.

[zrobotics]

Even with all the personalized knowledge Google has, often they still serve worse results than DDG. At this point, I think Google is relying far too much on their historical knowledge about me, since i almost always see results related to previous searches, which clutter the relevant results for my specific search string.