I agree wholeheartedly. First, there's the imprecision of the results -- sometimes Google just refuses to perform a verbatim search, even when you turn on the "verbatim" setting. I used to be able to force it to return exact results by putting quotes around each individual term and/or expression in my search string, but now even then doesn't work reliably.

In addition, on an increasing number of my searches, Google has been delivering results that resemble but don't *match* what I typed in the search field. After it happened a few times, I finally figured out what was happening: Google had "auto-corrected" my search terms without even asking me the usual annoying "Did you mean...?" question. Not only that, but when I try to re-input the terms, it "corrects" them again as soon as I hit enter. (That's even if I've put them in quotes and selected verbatim search!)

Then, of course, last but not least, there's a growing army of misguided marketers who spend a lot of time thinking up various crude and annoying ways to manipulate search engine results, apparently in the belief that we're all such idiots that we'll keep clicking on the same junk results. At this point, it has not only become more difficult to do serious research using the Internet, but it's even a pain sometimes to try to buy stuff online because you have to wade through pages and pages of links all delivering the exact same content and prices, thanks to the "affiliate" programs of some of the large Internet retailers. This last bit isn't Google's fault at all, but it does significantly degrade the quality of Google's search results.