From most complaints I've seen, it would seem to be Google's attempts to decrease the priority of pagerank and exact keyword prominence in trying to offer more

From most complaints I've seen, it would seem to be Google's attempts to decrease the priority of pagerank and exact keyword prominence in trying to offer more "helpful" results that make it less helpful in many situations. There should be a 'dumb search' mode for that. For cases where you don't want a dumb search, maybe analytics blocking could have an impact, as you suggest. Personally, I'd like a mode where they interleave dumb/popular and personalized/relevant results.