Personally I've found Google to be frustratingly difficult to search in recent years. I can't find articles & essays that I remember fondly because the namespace is so polluted with Great SEO.
Have you fond a better search engine? I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google, where I find what I was looking for.
Of course, one can always suggest that I am just better attuned to Google (I have Google Fu from long experience with Google and wrongfully expect DuckDuckGo Fu to be the same skill and have not developed DuckDuckGo Fu).
I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it.
Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees.
Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.
There's been a dozen things I've tried to search on HN, for example, looking for keywords and there's literally dozens of other links with similar topics that prevents me from finding what I looked for.
Various programming questions. Don't have an example right now, sorry.
No, DDG often fails me too. Especially when searching for programmer things -- sometimes what I really meant to search for is StackOverflow.com + any "programming blog.
Search for programmers?
At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the internet is a great idea but the implementation sucks and there's no easy way to fix it.
