Interestingly, the general perception I've had for a while now is that Google's search results have been getting slowly, gradually worse over the years. It seems like it works harder now to funnel you into some predefined concept of what it thinks you're looking for, rather than returning the data and letting you filter it yourself.

That's great for very common searches, but makes it much harder to find anything that Google doesn't expect (or want) you to look for.

Granted, I've got no data to back that up. I'm probably in the minority of users here, but I pretty sure I'm not the only one.

On the other hand I've found that for 98% of searches Google gives me exactly what I want as the first option and the other 2% Google makes some assumptions about my search and gives me garbage. Overall I'm very happy with it and it's definitely better for me than it was, it's interesting to see how different users can have very different perceptions of the same product