The one that I've noticed getting much worse over the last couple of years is Google (and to a smaller extent DuckDuckGo) removing the least common search term

The one that I've noticed getting much worse over the last couple of years is Google (and to a smaller extent DuckDuckGo) removing the least common search term if there aren't thousands of hits. Precise search terms are very valuable for hitting the right results in a pile of unrelated slop and Google is even doing things like returning all Windows results when I search for linux and some CLI app that isn't available for Windows and never was. I can put in full paths out of /sys and Google will happily remove linux and the entry name because I'm only getting 5000 hits. The only thing I can think of is that they're trying to increase the number of ad impressions by having you need to do more searches to find what you're looking for.