It often takes me over an hour just to find something vaguely related to what I'm looking for, even if I remember three or four different strings from the page.
I find that hard to believe. Can you give me an example?
I saw a writeup of a journal article just a few months ago about how there is a lot of randomness in how academic grants are distributed. They basically created several different panels of the people who write the grants and gave them each the same proposals to review, and there was an enormous variance between the proposals each panel funded. I think this was for NSF grants, but I'm not sure. Anyway I can't for the life of me find either the writeup or the journal article.
Similarly, I heard a story on NPR about a research study that found the best predictor of how much 8th graders would earn as adults wasn't race, gender, IQ, grades, or anything else like that, but rather was how much they thought they would earn as adults. Can't for the life of me find that one either.
In fact there is an entire field of research that's disappeared. I know for a fact that there is a field that's basically scientists researching scientists/science, but I can't find more than a couple of the papers in this field or even the appropriate wikipedia articles.
Have you tried a Google Scholar search? That's what it's tailor-made for; I remember it having a few search quality issues when I was in college, but if I was looking for academic work, that was the first place I'd go.
AFAIK Scholar also doesn't push more often than once every couple of years, so you can be fairly sure it wasn't broken by a recent ranking change, and what you see now is what you would've gotten in 2005, modulo additional articles published.
A big one for me is recipes. I find a great peach cobbler recipe, but if I don't bookmark it, it is tough to find again. Because a search for peach cobbler recipe comes back with hundreds of pages, each page has tens of different links to peach cobbler reciples. And remembering things like, "butter,sugar" don't really help.
I would find a jQuery plugin that's actually small, useful, and without 100+ custom attributes. I love it and didn't bookmark it thinking that Google will give it back to me again.
Next time I search using the exact same keywords, I got: "Top 25 jQuery plugins blogspam you never heard about!"
Google failed to deliver THAT plugin that I searched before.
I find that hard to believe. Can you give me an example?