Ads
You probably use ad-block when browsing the web. Why not use ad block for Google search too? Google shows too many ads! You’ll need to install a plugin, but it does’t require any further setup. Try Google Search Ad Remover And Customizer.
Settings
Are you getting only 10 results per page? That’s stingy. You’ll often get 10 ads too. How do people live like that? Click Google’s “gear icon” “quick settings” link at the top right to change your search preferences. You can increase number of results to 20, 50, even 100 per page!
Advanced search parameters
These are forgotten by most people, even techy power users. But they are very powerful!
Here’s a list of 60 tips and tricks, with examples. Here’s a list of 50 powerful search operators. If you don’t know about this stuff then you’re only accessing a very small part of the internet.
The internet has so many websites!
Even Google struggles to make sense of it all - decide which are fake or spammy or good.
So, many of those sites will be bad content, gathered by bots and spit out with bad design.
For example, codegrepper.com is such a bad site - copy/pasted by a bot from StackOverflow, but with no community or interaction, and terrible design and interface. There are many others like it.
uBlacklist to the rescue! Browser extension to ignore search results from domains you don’t like.
For programmers and developers
You can get JSON data from Google, but only 10 results at a time, and only 10000/month.
https://www.googleapis.com/customsearch/v1?key=AIzaSyD18qbt7FUo3S6Z1NpWw-7xyk7nb9uFSKk&cx=02b5ee38287123f12&q=blue&num=10
Google search is often useless
because of auto-generated result pages like the one below. E-commerce sites have them. Social sites have them. Many larger more established websites show up for every Google search. Do they pay for this? Are these advertisements?
There is no way Freelancer.com has pre-generated a page for this very very specific search term, then linked to it somewhere, so GoogleBot could crawl it. No. This is plain corruption of some kind, Google making their search bad on purpose so you click advertisements instead. Idk. It’s super hard to build a good search engine when everyone’s trying to hack your algorithm. But c’mon Google! This is trash. How did GoogleBot even crawl this?
And WTF is this? Why is Google sending me to the page
/tmqe7/jest-mock-object-property-value in a Pizza restaurant site even though it has no content? This is such trash. 
Nonsense results like this are probably my #1 complaint. I often search for very specific things, and often most of the results are nonsense like this.