Google search problems - is it just me?

I have had two problems recently: a) content farms - more and more of them breaking thru google's defences b) more disturbingly - getting NO results at all for searches that obviously should get results. I find this one very disturbing. So disturbing I ran the same queries on Bing (forgive me father for I have sinned) and got perfectly sensible results. So we have queries that (i) make total intuitive sense that there will be answers (ii) Bing finds such answers, and yet (iii) I get NO results from Google. This latter case is very new for me. I have been using google forever and am an experienced user and this phenomena is only over the last (approx) 4 weeks.

Has anyone else seen this kind of thing? Or should I start publishing searches to demonstrate (b)?