All of the Google sections seem to be terrible for their use case. Images are lacking filters and are filled with Pinterest results which send people into a cycle when trying to get to the actual image to save. News will sometimes show old news when it's obvious there should be new information about whatever you're searching, leading you to have to specifically indicate sort by date. Videos will prioritize certain domains even if the video itself is irrelevant to your search (ie searching up an actress, it'll show an IMDB video first, even if the video is very old and is just a generic trailer for some movie they were in ages ago). If you search something relatively generic, the new search bubbles will now hide the other categories (ie searching adele will hide categories like shopping or books). The finance option literally just redirects you to Google Finance now, doesn't even retain your search.
They've really let the core search experience be deteriorated so extensively, that we can't blame all of it on SEO.
I haven’t given it much thought until just now but it really is surprising how terrible Googles image search is. There are so many images on the Internet yet the image search often fails to retrieve good examples even on straightforward searches. Never mind difficult searches, higher resolution images, or if you want to quickly download an image. It was never very good and it’s gotten perceptible worse.
Side-thought: I have at times wished Google had a time machine function, for example, "show me the results that this search would have returned in 2008".
It would open up a whole new world of chronological meta analysis; a new dimension of cross-referencing.
[I understand that Google has, or had, some limited incarnation of this, in the form of it's Time Range search, but - and without looking deeply into it - I suspect that is an algorithmically different procedure than the one I am describing. That is, I expect that applies a simple filter to a current search, rather than being The Actual Old Search Results]
there have been many times when i'm searching for things i'll go into the "tools" and limit results from 1990-2010 and find exactly it with a handful of results, vs if i don't a ton of blogspam and other crap hiding it
NEWS (heh it contains new) is important to be up-to-date and recent.
But so many things are olds and you should give more weight to older pagerank-verified pages.