Why is literally every search engine variously but fundamentally fucking Broken, now? Yes even whatever one you were about to suggest.

And no it's not Just SEO/Marketing/Ad-Targeted shit on the search side, because even DDG is having these problems, and they're quite fucking scrupulous about these things.

Also, that still wouldn't explain the behaviour I'm talking about, even when accounting for SEO embedding on the site side. Again: not returning results that absolutely should come up in the search parameters, but returning those results with different, possibly less-well-related parameters.

@Wolven Speculation: could queries by AI be starting to impact the search recommendation algorithms?