Yes, I have noticed this recently too, although I have no hard and fast examples.
Google _seems_ to be returning more popular/mainstream sites at the expense of less popular sites that may be more relevant.
Also- Google has stopped penalising sites that don't contain all of the search terms. It has always removed "stopwords" (words that are too common to be relevant: and, it, or, etc.) which is fine, but now it seems to remove significant terms as well. This makes a big difference if you are searching for programming stuff, particularly error messages.
From a pure search point of view Google is losing ground to its competitors, and that has _never_ happened before.
Google _seems_ to be returning more popular/mainstream sites at the expense of less popular sites that may be more relevant.
Also- Google has stopped penalising sites that don't contain all of the search terms. It has always removed "stopwords" (words that are too common to be relevant: and, it, or, etc.) which is fine, but now it seems to remove significant terms as well. This makes a big difference if you are searching for programming stuff, particularly error messages.
From a pure search point of view Google is losing ground to its competitors, and that has _never_ happened before.