This may be obvious, but I recently started routinely adding "-youtube" to google searches. This eliminates most pages with links to garbage YouTube-monetized videos that try to attract people looking for basic instructions on how to do simple things. Greatly improves the quality of search results.
@mattblaze do other Boolean search things work?
@VirginiaSOpossum There's a bunch of useful stuff you can do to restrict searches. See the "operators" section of this for a starting point: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en