To get anything useful out of Google, I often have to resort to using "verbatim" results from the search tools. Those results are much closer to the old Google than the standard search, but not perfect.

I remember how revolutionary late 90s Google was in how it would show you exactly what you were looking for, or pages with relevant content, whereas the other popular search engines was just be a jumble of stuff.

It seems like in order to monetize search, Google has had to regress what once worked well.