To get anything useful out of Google, I often have to resort to using "verbatim" results from the search tools. Those results are much closer to the old Google than the standard search, but not perfect.

I remember how revolutionary late 90s Google was in how it would show you exactly what you were looking for, or pages with relevant content, whereas the other popular search engines was just be a jumble of stuff.

It seems like in order to monetize search, Google has had to regress what once worked well.

Are you familiar with duckduckgo.com stack overflow integration?

It will pickup your search is technical and embed the best stack overflow answer it could find. Sometimes with a code snippet.

Google is increasingly returning irrelevant results in the effort to deliver the targeted content their advertisers want. I predict a future for a subscription funded search engine that just delivers lexically relevant results without all the bullshit. I for one would gladly pay to use something better than Google. The advertising monetization model is broken.

Second your opinion, Google hasn't been crazy good at domain specific search for me lately.

Google video search is also weaker than a pure youtube search for me too, so much so that I only use youtube search nowadays which is perhaps their intent...