I've noticed a steep drop in the quality of results I receive from Google without the extensive use of search operators. Especially for politicized topics, I feel like I'm constantly fighting the search engine for access to a more diverse and useful spread of results. This has become such an issue that I've moved over to searx.me (meta-search engine) for the majority of my searches. While there are some edge cases where I have to move over to google (mostly image search), I feel like the results I receive from it are broadly superior to the ones I'm receiving from Google alone.