I'm a so called power user and don't really understand why everyone says it's worse. Google is better than ever. The problem I've seen is folks using older techniques for searching that don't really make sense anymore.
I don't see how exact search string can lose its sense. But it does yield "no results", more often than before even if the string has to be publicly available somewhere, in a source I could make sense of.
I can see how google can be seen as better in some ways, but brushing all case where it's worse as irrelevant looks like an easy shortcut to shut down complains without caring if they might be legit.