[joe_the_user]

Absolutely this. Google has gotten notably worse in just the last two years.

Today:

* Any term that might be related to a commercial product? That product comes first and frequently only.

* Search for two terms? It will first give it's prefer result for each separately - usually commercial products (ha). And then might give them together.

* Quoted terms are often taken as vague suggestions. Negative sign is often useless, etc.

[ignite]

Google has gotten notably worse in the last few months. I keep getting the feeling it is serving results for a query similar to what I entered, but more popular. It drowns out any results that actually might answer my questions.

[sidewndr46]

One of the worst innovations they've introduced is returning results for things you did not search for. At this point, potentially anything is a valid search result for any search query.

[qrio2]

god, the quoted text suggestion thing is really the nail in the coffin. Used to feel like a wizard showing people how to get exact search results, now... well, that's why we're having this discussion