What's worse is that it actively tries to rewrite your query by dropping keywords (esp. ironic when it does it to the single most important thing in said query) and substituting "synonyms" which aren't, presumably so that the output would have more results.

I find having to quote things more and more, to the point where all or almost all keywords are quoted. Lately, somehow, even that produces results that don't actually include everything that was quoted.

When you put every keyword in quotes it still incorrectly stems them, and it still ignores some keywords completely.

I also wonder why almost no web forums I use are coming up in results at all, despite their robots.txt allowing indexing. Feels like Google is becoming a bit like East Germany...

As a loyal Google user from 1999-2021 that has now fully decoupled from all of it's services, it's a deeply tragic loss.

If Google is so large and so arrogant that they can't even take feedback from internal employees then it's probably game over for them. They certainly aren't listening to developers and power users on forums.

The search engine is significantly worse than it was even a few years ago.