It works only if they're well-known lyrics or a popular track

Same here. I've generally found complaints about Google's recent decline to be overblown, but lyrics are one area where it's truly gone off the deep end.

Even if I type in 2-3 lines worth of nearly-exact lyrics that show up on multiple lyrics websites, it'll give me completely unrelated songs that match several words at most.

On that note, if anyone needs a good browser-based song finder, the "Aha Music Identifier" extension is pretty good. It's a life saver when watching Twitch streams that don't list the currently-playing song.

Not just lyrics. Searching for quotations or text excerpts is much harder and double quotes to only get exact matches also returns unrelated results.

On the other hand, chatgpt 4o-mini and 3.5 will just make up source material which is amusing but not very helpful.