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SEO is what is killing Google. Companies designing shit websites designed to highjack search results is a huge issue.
It's also because they search for something different than your query in order to combat seo in certain cases, and to help people who don't know how to use Google: https://moz.com/blog/google-modifying-searches
But it seems like this behavior tends to break down when the user knows what they're doing and Google does something different because it thinks it knows better search terms...
This article illustrates that google understands the intent of a search well enough to consistently show relevant results to the end user. For as long as I've used google, I think I've "fought" the engine to find a specific result like three times ever. Just today, I used it to figure out what I mistyped on my keyboard when taking notes by putting it into google and letting it autocorrect. This article does not demonstrate a problem with google that has degraded the quality of search results. It shows the opposite, actually.