Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy
IMHO Google has been in decline since ~2010 or so, but it's only recently that the dive in quality became very noticeable. Try searching for anything even mildly technical outside of software, and you are presented with pages upon pages of completely irrelevant SEO spam. Automotive repair manuals (for very old cars) are one example; it used to be that you could easily find a link to a PDF, and the results were otherwise mostly relevant; but now you get only sites claiming to sell it to you, and more SEO spam.<p>Two more examples are error messages and IC part markings --- searches are flooded with results that <i>do not even contain all the words in the query</i>. I didn't put those words there for no reason, ignoring them is absolutely unacceptable. This becomes ridiculous when you search for error numbers, where a search containing the exact number and the word "error" gets flooded with plenty of useless results about <i>other</i> errors.