I've noticed this many times too, particularly recently, and I call it "Google Alzheimer's" --- what was once a very powerful search engine that could give you thousands (yes, I've tried exhausting its result pages many times, and used to have much success finding the perfect site many dozens of pages deep in the results) of pages containing nothing but the exact words and phrase you search for has seemingly degraded into an approximation of a search engine that has knowledge of only very superficial information, will try to rewrite your queries and omit words (including
the very word that makes all the difference --- I didn't put it in the search query for nothing!), and in general is becoming increasingly useless for finding the sort of detailed, specific information that search engines were once ideal for.
To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something you know exists, very often it will think you're a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.
Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I'm often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply "falling off the radar".
To add insult to injury, if you do try to make complex and slightly varying queries and exhaust its result pages in an effort to find something you know exists, very often it will think you're a robot and present you with a CAPTCHA, or just ban you completely (solving the CAPTCHA just gives you another, and no matter how many you solve it keeps refusing to search; but they probably benefit from all the AI help you just gave them, what bastards...) for a few hours.
Google had the biggest most comprehensive index for many years, which is why it was my sole search engine. Now I'm often finding better results with Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and even Yandex, but part of me is very worried that large and extremely valuable parts of the Web are, despite still being accessible, simply "falling off the radar".