Over the years, I've found the frequency of "0 result" queries has gone way up. Subjective anecdata from me, but it's a pretty big difference. There must be some large areas of their index that have been dropped over time.

Also 1 page results. Around 10-20 links. Like, that's it? Really? No more? That's not what I see when I try the same query on Bing!

I've noticed the same. And sometimes you'll get search results showing 10+ pages, but if you actually follow through them, the results die by the second page. Google also omits many domains from search results now.

Which has the really annoying side effect that now you actually need to produce a worse query to get decent results.

A few years back I used to scoff at people who wrote searches in the form of literal questions instead of boiling things down to key terms, e.g. the "how do i..., what is the largest..." type searches.

Nowadays I not only need to write stupid searches like this to get better results but quite literally find that my brain has adapted the pattern and my past skill at crafting salient key term, operator driven queries is eroding.

Sites like Twitter and Instagram also frequently completely change the search term now to something else for certain queries. This practice is anti-competitive in the highest order. The very foundation of having a text search is to have an exact query match to begin with... The alternate spelling item should only be a suggestion in results at the most, but they've flipped this now, and that's outright deceptive.

It is located under the search query itself. For instance, see https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22spill%20clean%20big..., a nonsense query I made up with no hits. You should see

    No results found for "spill clean big search stain".

    Results for spill clean big search stain (without quotes):

on the page.

This isn't new, I've always seen Google doing something like this. It hasn't always been large on the page but it's always been there.

Might be desktop exclusive? For me on mobile (testing another random phrase as now yours hits this post), I don't see that text, or any other indication the query has been modified.

I'm used to that. But this is worse, this is when the search I enter would give the ideal results because I eventually contort the search parameters that I find some results.