What's going on is those of us who have been using the Web since Google was brand new (or earlier...remember AltaVista?) expect a search engine to find text on web pages.

What the average user in the post-smartphone world expects a search engine to do is deliver an answer to a question. These are basically incompatible, and it seems like a progressively smaller circle of the Web is being surfaced by Google these days, as they focus heavily on popularity and novelty.