It doesn't help that Google tries to guess what you actually wanted to search for.

Give Kagi a go, it gives (usually) much better results. It's a paid service, but you get 100 free searches as a trial

I wonder if we need to abandon the internet as it currently exists as a whole and start over from first principles and license all the software in such a way that prevents shareholders from profiting. After religion, that's the main thing ruining global society at the moment, is shareholder profits.

I use Brave search because the AI summaries are pretty good (don't come at me), but you could use SearXNG to get a better overview of results. I also really really love using Perplexity.ai, it always gives you sources you can use as points for deeper searching