aspdesigner - 7:45 am on Jun 12, 2010 (gmt 0)

"I've been frustrated in my searches with google and find myself using tighter and tigher parameters, or using a metasearch engine or bing."

@Freedom: Sometimes, when we are doing SEO, we tend to have too narrow of a focus to see the big picture.

It was my own experiences accessing Google from a USER's viewpoint, as detailed in my first post in this thread [webmasterworld.com], that alerted me to the fact that something was seriously wrong with Google.

"I'm not trying to jump on the me too train, but when doing searches, the pages that show up set me back a bit as it never seems to be what I am looking for."

Take a look at the titles of the pages that are coming-up. Are many of the titles showing-up in the Top-10 only containing SOME of the search phrase you entered, even for competitive searches? Or containing an alternative word instead of what you actually searched for, that has a similar but not identical meaning to the word you actually entered?