The default experience is far worse than it used to be. A common situation is I'll search for a 3-4 word phrase and the top results contain one of those words.

The default experience is far worse than it used to be. A common situation is I'll search for a 3-4 word phrase and the top results contain one of those words. If I'm really lucky Google will have attempted to match some terrible synonym of the other words, but frequently it doesn't even do that! If you put everything in quotes, it's better, but there's so much SEO spam in the first page of results. I can't remember the last time I found anything really interesting with Google, for software development it's basically just a mediocre way to search Stack Overflow, GitHub, and MSDN. It's depressing.