I yearn to return to the days where search engines worked on keywords. When you could explicitly tell it what terms you were looking for. None of this "trying to guess what you really meant" stuff. I've found that all of the old 'google-fu' techniques only work incidentally. Perhaps it is because they want people to ask questions using natural language? I understand that an "answer engine" has its use cases, but that shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of what it means to query something online.

I have no idea what kind of metrics lead Google towards fixating on the most generic terms of a search, but it is infuriating that Bing is moving in this direction too. It seems like even Google's competitors cannot help but follow its lead.