I'm not sure "their quest to control the spread of misinformation" is the reason behind this, as the search quality got lower and lower before the whole panic a

I'm not sure "their quest to control the spread of misinformation" is the reason behind this, as the search quality got lower and lower before the whole panic around misinformation started. My guess would be that Google is tailoring their search engine to ~80% of the queries and optimizing for those, so when you're searching for the 20%, it's really bad. But when within 80%, it works great. I remember back in the day when you had to know how to search in order to find things. Some people were better than others and different search engines had different tricks. Nowadays it seems like trying to optimize your search query makes it worse, and most engines just deal with generalized queries.