First, I wish you & your wife all the best.
For me it's the same. The search has been made more easy for everyone by Google. But that implied the reduction of some Poweruser functions.
In the early times, one could use "+" and "-" to define the search in detail. Nowadays, no +/- anymore accepted in the search, but... There is a link somewhere for "advanced search ".
If you get onto that page, you can define the search in detail. I, for me, automatically use the advanced search, with exclusion of certain terms within the search results.
May be this is not be known to you - if it's already used by you, then:
Yes. The SEO-Cancer has brought us link farming. The reason for existence of such sites is just to raise the "creditability" of certain domains and having a lot of Backlinks & clicks - thus, being listed by Google at the foremost top.
I usually skip the first page and start my search with the 2nd page of results.
Or, I start the search and whilst not getting good results, I use the very same search page, and type in different/further search terms for my topic. The results become more refined in the second run..
Goog is still the best, but one needs to adapt to the search workflow of theirs.
Alternatively, you can try www.startpage.com..