[jfengel]

I wonder how much of that is technology, and how much is actually inherent to the privacy.

Google collects your data to show you ads, but it also uses that to inform its search algorithm. Exactly how it does so is deliberately opaque, but it's no surprise that it knows that you probably mean the local restaurant rather than the one in Indiana by the same name -- and even that you mean that restaurant despite having mistyped it as the name of a different restaurant.

There is assuredly more to it than that, and it's not really a surprise that it can give you better search results if it knows who you are. Whether that's worth your privacy is up to you -- though many people don't really make that choice consciously.

[Terr_]

I tend to blame the tech (or lack of indexing-resources) since often it's not finding something I'm sure exists despite plenty of exact keywords.

To use the restaurant example, I'd be putting in the city-name explicitly.