In my experience, Google is getting better at finding more general information and worse in finding specific information.
It also tries to "help" too much with fuzzy matching which starts to make it useless if you are looking for less common thing. For example, if you search for "nmake tabs vs spaces" it returns a bunch of results for GNU make and flame wars about tabs vs spaces instead of nmake specific info regarding usage of tabs or spaces in nmake makefiles.
Yes, they seem to be dropping keywords that overly restrict results which is ironic since those keywords are oftentimes the most important due to their specificity.
I find myself preemptively using quotes more and more with Google. I kind of which their logic was segmented by user-type.
It also tries to "help" too much with fuzzy matching which starts to make it useless if you are looking for less common thing. For example, if you search for "nmake tabs vs spaces" it returns a bunch of results for GNU make and flame wars about tabs vs spaces instead of nmake specific info regarding usage of tabs or spaces in nmake makefiles.