Ask HN: Is Google's search quality declining?

A few minutes ago I wanted to find the table of contents for a book from high school—a collection of short stories called Characters in Conflict. I knew a few of the story titles, so I did a multiple-phrase search, like so:

  "to build a fire" "harrison bergeron" "characters in conflict"

The results from a Google search are near useless. Curious, I tried DuckDuckGo (which I've heard of but don't regularly use). The fifth result was this page, https://ci.nii.ac.jp/ncid/BA09833406?l=en, which had a nice text table of contents.

How is it possible that Google, with its vast resources, isn't showing me this page for my search? Is it possible that it was missed in the crawl?

The only reason I tried DuckDuckGo in the first place was a hunch that for research, Google has actually gotten worse. It seems almost too clever for its own good. It can interpret natural language queries and I can use it to zero in on a celebrity's name I don't know just by typing a few related words—and yet when I want to use it to find a needle in a haystack, it's hit or miss.

Anyone else experience the same thing, or is this an n=1 situation?