To be honest, I've felt Google has been 'babying' me too much in the last year. I've had part of my queries dropped, different intent inferred and weird verb stemming applied to my searches. In the last 6 months there have been at least a dozen occasions where I've felt the results are total crap for no good reason.
(mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history)
There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing.
(eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)
Yes, one of the few major problems I have with Google is that it just changes your query sometimes when you really want what you typed, and the slight change (adding an "s", most often, for me) swamps the results you're looking for in a sea of unrelated stuff. Even using quotes doesn't help here, though it should. I'll try to remember to use Bing for those kinds of queries when I run into one again.
(mind you, that's out of 15,000 searches according to my Google search history)
There's also the general problem of too many commercial pages when you're trying to get information, not a product. However Bing, et al, seems to suffer from the same thing.
(eg, try finding out information about the Shoreline Amphitheatre VIP lounge experience. There are sites out there which discuss it, but it took a ridiculous number of permutations of search terms to finally find them)