I am now afraid to use Google for my search results as I might miss something important. What is a reliable search engine now, and how did Google end up like this?

Image is perfect example - slightly obscure movie with unusual name, Google didn't even try.

Unfortunately, I feel that no single solution exists. I now basically resign to fate and trying multiple search engines with different proprieties, currently Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Yahoo (Japan), and Daum/Naver, plus Tineye, Wikimedia Commons, and image publishers (for example Getty, Reuters and AP) when searching for images.

I've used searx with moderate success, but you really have to put effort into the different backends. Sometimes paid backends actually are worth it, a lot of the time it makes sense to write your own with a ~1 week on-disk cache of the top 500 results. Colossal amount of work though.