Try using natural language phrases in search like "reddit on best phone to buy" - most search engines are NLP enabled and can give more relevant results.
This is good advice. I used to be very good at formatting queries in search-engine-ese, but that stopped working well. I finally tried switching to asking questions in normal language, and my results started getting good again. It seems that AI has reached a point where natural language is better than trying to talk like a computer.
A big part of the problem is that it returns results from years ago, even when I specify that I want only recent results. I tried a few different variations and the results were still bad.
To be fair, Google has always been trash at searching for recentness. I don't remember a time when searching "recommended X (current year)" didn't return old out-of-date info. I think Google has had a habit of returning 3-year-old pages since its inception.
Did you click on the results? I just checked that exact query and it's mostly the same links - the first one is the one from 6 years ago, as with my original search.
