Out of all the issues you have listed here, the one that rings true for me is the dis-inclusion of search terms.
It can be really annoying to perform a search including a technical keyword and get page upon page of irrelevancy, only to discover your keyword was never included in the first place.
This is the only thing you've mentioned that actively makes google less useful to me. Like you say it is reminiscent of the bad old days of search.
I think Google's early success can be attributed to its ANDing of search terms, perhaps just as importantly as PageRank. If you searched for oatmeal cookie recipe, Alta Vista would search for oatmeal OR cookie OR recipe, but Google would search for oatmeal AND cookie AND recipe. Google's recent reversal is disappointing.
Oh, do I ever remember jamming pluses in front of all my search terms. So annoying.
When I switched early to Google, I would chuckle at people who said "search for +firefox +windows +download". Because I didn't have to do that anymore, I used Google. Google knew.
Now I'm back to defensive plus-prefixing. It's kind of depressing.
This is the kind of thing upon which public opinion can turn. If someone claims "I'm worried Google is getting dumber", you can understand that perspective because you've had this experience.
That kind of loss of confidence can ping-pong among influential folks, turn into a trope for news stories and then become conventional wisdom.
Search quality is not just about results, it's about the overall experience. I know Google knows that, but this is an example of how closely they need to guard against regressions.
would be an interesting hack to just add a frontend that prepended a + to each word and then submitted to google. (and it would be cute to call it +google, though that would likely get you a call from a lawyer or two)
yes. this behaviour, I dunno when it exactly got as bad as this, is the first time in a decade that it really makes me switch away to different search engines, even for everyday queries.
I used to just switch if I had a particularly hard search or needed some special feature I knew another SE would provide better.
BTW I find that Yandex, the russian SE is also quite good. I don't know exactly what/how they did it, but it has a sort of smooth, quick, basic and simple "feel" similar to Google that makes me able to imagine myself really using it by default.
It can be really annoying to perform a search including a technical keyword and get page upon page of irrelevancy, only to discover your keyword was never included in the first place.
This is the only thing you've mentioned that actively makes google less useful to me. Like you say it is reminiscent of the bad old days of search.