I barely think of Google as a search engine for the web anymore. Modern Google is more like an "ask a commonly asked question and get an answer" engine.
My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.
It's great if you want a major brand, shopping site, or easily answered question that wikipedia and sport sites can answer. Which has been the direction they've been going in for years with updates to prioritise brands, recency and frequency of update etc. Add in the search bubble from your history, and "Google knows best" including also words and considering even quoted terms optional. Not much search engine left.
Course it makes it ever more useless for the difficult, the rare and the old. The personal homepage, blog, or random site with the best knowledge on something esoteric almost never shows any more.
Bing isn't much better, DDG became best - it's certainly not worse any more - almost by default.
What's interesting re: getting better results is how much my own behavior has changed in response to how Google behaves now.
In 2006 I would never search "how do I ___", "what is ___", because "how", "what", etc. were just noise, and sites weren't formatted as a question/FAQ like that. I knew to use a series of keywords to find pages that contain the content I was looking for.
I wonder too how much the decline of personal homepages, blogs, random sites, etc. has to do with how much harder it has become to find them in Google.
My problem with this is that the usefulness of web searching seems to have been sacrificed in order to be good at answering the common questions. It's great if I have a question a bunch of other people have asked too, not so good if I'm looking for anything more than that.