Your observations are spot on. The quality of Google search has deteriorated, and it's now common to get irrelevant but "popular" results, which then makes these results even more "popular" as more people click on them, regardless if they discover them to be useless later, effectively creating a feedback loop. Conversely, it has become more difficult to find something rare, even if you have the exact keywords, as Google will either show no matches or return millions of unrelated results, although it used to be able to deal with this kind of search quite well in the past.

Part of the problem is because content farms have got better at positioning themselves at the top of search results but ultimately it's about Google stopping to improve their searches other than by personalizing them using all the information they have on file about you, which is often not what you want, especially as a frequent traveler (Google assumes you are looking for information based on your current location or one from your history, it doesn't expect you to travel somewhere new).

In fact, some of Google search features were removed, presumably to reduce server load. The index depth and quality also appears to have been reduced. A more sinister interpretation would be that Google realized they don't stand to benefit from helping you to find what you're after quickly but rather want to make you spend time on their results pages as you keep looking endlessly. This is what Facebook's paradigm has been right from its inception, and not only did they get away with it but have done very well for themselves by putting their content in a walled garden only accessible through a cumbersome interface.

More to the point, i.e. what can you do about it. Some ways I can think of:

• Make sure the results you get are not polluted by personalization: stay logged out of your Google Account, use an extensions such as Cookie AutoDelete to clean up all the tracking information every time you close all Google tabs, or use the private browsing mode, or a separate browser installation that is set to clean everything on exit.
• Set your browser not to share your location with Google.
• Enclose every keyword in quotes, otherwise Google will drop one of them randomly when it decides it knows better than you what you are looking for. Even better if you can think of a whole phrase that the result page will have.
• Use intitle: and inurl: while they still work.
• If you know the answer is going to be within a particular domain, use site: to narrow it down

Unfortunately I don't think there is any alternative to Google search now. There's DuckDuckGo but it's not a different index as such, just a privacy wrapper essentially. For some searches Yandex works better, as it has, paradoxically perhaps, less filtering, although I don't think it would help with the kind of search in your example.