It seems like I’ll do a search, for a particular business, for example, and most of the front page hits will be B.S. portal sites with nothing but other silly links, as opposed to the official site.
Has this always been a problem, or is it something new? Should I be worried that Google is becoming less effective? Or am I just dreaming this up?
I have been on Goggle for over 7 years. I think that you are dreaming or making weird searched. It works perfectly fine for me and always has.
If your first-page hits for common queries have any link farms on them at all you’ve got a hijacked browser. Google hates link farms & does their damndest to filter them out.
Everyone gets some link-farm hits once in a while, but I don’t think it’s any worse now than it has been in the past… If you really want to know, give us a couple examples; we can do the same search and compare results.
I have absolutely noticed substantial changes in Google’s behavior in many areas.
In the computer arena, for example, I can no longer google email addresses (They eliminated explicit email lookups 2-3 years ago, and defeated the workaround about a year ago. Now it seems to avoid indexing the name part of an email, before the @) IP addresses, likewise are almost ungoogleable – instead of getting pages of server logs (which I found useless) or net-tool lookups at the top of the page (akin to the conversion and calculator features) which would be useful, I now get next to nothing (and much of that is old).
That’s not a big part of the changes I’ve noticed, but I just finished tracking down some stuff for some servers I admin, so “the good old days” when it was a much more useful in that regard are fresh on my mind, and those examples are easy to describe. In over a decade of using web-spiders and desktop based meta-search tools (not prepackaged web-based meta-engines, though Ive used those, too) I “know what’s out there” on some specific searches, and notice when they don’t show up in my results, despite being present and not blocked by a domain’s robot.txt rules. I also notice (and appreciate) when I hit new results that I should have gotten long before. That doesn’t happen very often
On one hand, I find it seems to dig somewhat deeper on some kinds of search; on the other, I find that it “gives up” and returns very few results (2-5) on low-result searches where it once returned a handful (a few dozen – most of which were irrelevant to me, but I can’t screen what they don’t show me, and I’d like that decision to be mine) Searches for phrases, either framed in quotes, or with the spaces/punctuation replaced by hyphens, simply don’t work as well and aren’t as comprehensive. I can understand why: I’ve long been impressed by their mad indexing skills, but I’m enough of a programmer to recognize what resource hogs some of my searches must’ve been.
I find it better for casual searches than it was several years ago, but less responsive to carefully crafted searches. I’m sure that pleases many people, but not me. I grew up with computer searches that required carefully honed use of Booleans and categories. I don’t begrudge convenience --bring it on-- but pay attention to my restrictions, and don’t drop anything I didn’t tell you to drop. I don’t like tools, like Microsoft’s Bob and Clippy, that try to substitute their thinking for mine, especially at the cost of completeness.
I think it’s better for most people – or even most of my searches, but…
Google has been my primary search engine for a scary number of years now, and an valuable part of my daily life – I hardly touch my written references anymore-- but I’ve been on the market for other options, especially in certain specialized searches. I can’t say I’ve had much luck finding them among the current crop, including such former favorites as AltaVista and meta-engines. I’d love to hear of tools that other Dopers have found.
I use Google hundreds, maybe more, times every week, both for work and to help out Cecil on occasion when he sends out a “please help fact-check this” request. And over just the last month or so, I have noticed something has changed with Google. MUCH more often than normal, pages are coming up with none of the search terms in them, and even the cached copy won’t have them. Many more pages are coming up “blank” or completely inaccessible. And didn’t it used to be that if you searched on:
(note - just an example. This search seems to work OK right now)
…that Google would return pages with ALL those terms by default? It sure seemed like it used to. It no longer does that consistently now, and I have to do
to get it to behave - sometimes. (Note the “sometimes” before you respond telling me “Nope! Doesn’t happen to me!”) Other times, it behaves just fine.
I admit I have no idea why it is behaving differently, nor can I repeat it enough times, but something is up. 
One explanation for erratic and inconsistent behavior is that your searches are directed to a server farm that is probably not in sync with other server farms.
This morning, for example, while searching for “California bar,” my friend on the East Coast returned over 76 million pages, whereas my search for “California bar” returned about 250,000 pages. I got the same number of results about an hour later when I got to my office.
I just searched the same terms again now and I am returning over 76 million pages.
I am very fond of Exalead. The “Advanced Search” includes “phonetic spelling” and “approximate spelling” options that are very useful. My loyalty to Google took a sharp downturn when Google Answers got the axe. Exalead is my new love.
One of the reasons you might get a page that were missing a search term is because Google ranks a given page in part by which other pages are pointing to it. If a bunch of pages use the word “horse” a lot, and they all have a link to another page, the odds are that the page will wind up in searches on “horse”, even if the page in question never has the word “horse” in its text.