Yeah this is the surprising part to me, I have managed to use Yandex successfully to track down specific documents and videos when Google failed.

Google search tries and fails to interpret what you want to search for, where there was no interpretation needed in the first place.

I think what recently google has started doing is over index on Forbes, medium etc to fight spam which means all the articles are just that typical forbes-y and medium-y lacking any human element or insight.

The problem with spam is so much that they are kinda using these large well known sites as a filter which means the whole point of a search engine is lost as the rest of the internet is not available.