> google seems to want full sentences instead of just keywords now. "How do I do X?" seems to get me better(?) results then "X + some relevant keyword"
Correct. Google will give you better results with full-sentence-like input. After several years of refining results, Google concluded that there's more benefit in teaching the machines to understand how humans ask questions than to teach humanity how to keyword like a computer expects (especially when you factor in that they get as many queries via voice these days as via text, and voice recognition in general always benefits from more information to disambiguate on). There's an entire semantic-analysis layer in front of the keywording layer these days to determine some semantics of the query to try and guess what category of thing you're looking for.
I generally have no problem with a few keywords for software engineering searches. I usually go general-to-specific (for example, `react unit test useState`).
You can drop the video results by adding `-youtube` to the query.
> "Sal dulu a" would both recommend "Sal dulu antasma" and list it but now unless i search for that particularly, it doesn't show up.
I'm not sure, but it's possible Google dropped 'a' as a signifier because of the semantic query support (as a single particle, it doesn't add signal to a sentence-like query). `sal dulu songs` gives me a list where Antasma shows up as item 3.
In general, my advice for Googling these days would be "don't try to keyword it out." Think more like how you'd ask another human for a random fact they might barely remember.
There's also still some symbols that are specifically understood by Google for tuning queries, listed here (https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en). Worth noting: the `+` modifier got killed when Google+ came and went. To force a word or phrase to be part of the results instead of "fuzzy-matched," put it in "quotes". Quotes these days do double-duty as both "I want this literally matched" and "results must include this token."