I agree with your experience - to me it also seems I used to enter a search phrase and get back a page of results that exactly match it, these days, I often get

I agree with your experience - to me it also seems I used to enter a search phrase and get back a page of results that exactly match it, these days, I often get things that only vaguely thematically relate to my search phrase instead. Sometimes I would change a word in my search phrase or add an extra word to make the intent much more specific and still get essentially the same search results!!! Terrible, just terrible.