In general I find Google's results to be very heavily ecommerce oriented these days but this is the first time I've considered the issue for specific keywords.

In general I find Google's results to be very heavily ecommerce oriented these days but this is the first time I've considered the issue for specific keywords. I think it may be the result of an algorithm change to better infer meaning from search terms. In incognito Chrome, I see similar results to what you describe for "women in cocktail dresses" and "Office Christmas party". I would consider these to both be poor quality results but not terribly surprising. For term 1 the "women" keyword and the fashion classification are probably leading to a more ecommerce-stilted result. For term 2 there is probably some sort of "popular media" keyword list, and the search term is the exact name of a recent movie. For "photo of a boy flying kite", I see mostly stock photo results. I believe this to be a fair quality result. You should start collecting examples of these with screenshots.