I started having trouble about 10 years back. It was like a switch flipped from one day to the next, literally. Searches that worked one day failed the next. I was digging through 10 pages of results, having to select `verbatim` and other options before I found literally the same thing I'd read a week before. It improved again after that as I relearned how to use this new, failing, Google. But it's certainly gotten worse again. For instance, searching for a tv show title will now give you a frontpage mostly showing current, topical articles on it. This isn't wrong, but sometimes the IMDB link or even the show's own homepage will be on the second page of links.

If I want news I'll go to the news tab. This also means that my results will shift from day to day very rapidly as new content gets created because it gets precedence in the display.

Of course, news searching is also horribly broken. I tried to find an article (previously found through google news search). I knew when it was published but couldn't recall the site, selecting those date ranges returned 0 results. Selecting all time returned results that included dates within that range, but not the desired article. I eventually found it, by going home and looking in my browser history.