I seem to recall reading an article earlier in the year where research showed that Google users were more than a little cheesed off with the speed and accuracy of Google searches... and that other search engines, such as MS's Bing were producing more accurate search results.
In addition, complaints were increasing that Google results were being distorted by an increasing amount of internet trash sites, high in the initial search results.
These trash sites are written by an army of webpage writers who were tweaking their "content farms" (relatively useless sites that just gather strings of only mildly related info, and who then con advertisers into buying ads with them)... so that their "content farms" were picked up first by Google algorithms... and those "content farms" then gained the highest rankings in the search engines results.
Stung, Google claimed it has "tweaked" the performance of Google searches by changing the algorithms to reduce the rankings in the search results, of the useless sites such as the "content farms".
The Google "tweaks" also involved the increased use of "inline autocomplete", whereby your typing result is "guessed at" after a few keystrokes, and completed for you.
I also find this new arrangement distasteful and annoying, and eBay also use it as well. We must be getting old, Cap'n Drapes, it was much better in the old days of Windoze 98....
Google Tweaks Search Engine to Improve Quality of Search Results | Lakeshore Branding