> Dramatically worse... if that's true, then I wonder how good they were a decade ago.

Oh, I forget some people doesn't know why Google enjoy their current position:

Back before 2007 they completely blew competition out of the water:

If something was accessible on the Internet and wasn't behind a noindex spell, Google would find it.

Compared to other search engines that both then and now work more like Google does today it was totally amazing.

Then things started to go sideways:

- first there was: did you mean <something else with similar spelling>? (this was actually user friendly)

- then there was: we didn't find many results for <search term> so we included <related but different search term>, use double quotes to search for "<search term>"

- then there was fuzzing: expnding all my search terms into the unrecognizable unless I double quoted them

- and the latest few years they have also ignored my double quotes

somewhere in between there they messed up the + operator that used to mean "make sure this term is included" as well as ~ that used to mean I wanted Google to fuzz that term.

Sometimes I can get better results by trying to think how my wife would phrase the question, i.e. instead of searching for

- <search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box>

I search for

- <why does my computer show search terms including a weird mispeling from a dialog box>

But other times nothing works.