I think there are two things at play here. This first is that you were probably a power user back when good search results required you to be good at search sy

I think there are two things at play here. This first is that you were probably a power user back when good search results required you to be good at search syntax. Back when Google wasn't the only search engine on the web, you could ask Google questions. Your results would be limited in relevance. If you tailored your searches by ensuring specific words or phrases were included, excluded irrelevant phrases, and added wildcards where necessary, you'd get pages and pages of great results. Google takes your search history and tries to predict what you're actually looking for. The second is how Google filters your results to try to tailor what is relevant to you. Most people who hang out here on HN or StackOverflow would probably get results for the software framework filtered to the top when searching for "electron". Chemists, physicists, and other scientists of the like are probably going to get results for the particle filtered to the top. Adding this type of customization probably has ramifications beyond simple terms like electron. I don't have any evidence whatsoever, but I imagine that this customization would give biased results when searching political, economic, or social topics based on the sites that are visited.