Interesting; my experience has differed: I noticed since late 2022 (last year) Youtube Search was essentially ignoring my exact queries, giving only the first two or so result matching the query - the rest of the results aren't even marginally related.
Worse--this behavior continues, and has gotten so bad that today searching is all but useless to me.
Exactly! It's so infuriating to search for a song cover and instead of being able to discover indie musician covers or rare live recordings, I get the studio version + 2 results, then I get redirected to 'related' songs.
I made a simple YouTube search form with search filters that work well on YouTube: https://playlists.at/youtube/search/