Totally agree. I posted the comment just summarizing the article and then tried it (order of operations, I know) and I could not get relevant results for the life of me. I tried queries and simple phrases and everything was unrelated to what I was looking for.
Not sure if the terms chosen were dumb luck or what, but the article may need to provide some instructions if it was so good for the author. It sucks because many people want a search engine that worked like Google from 10-20 years ago.
Tl;dr, use Marginalia for basic queries.
I love the concept of clipboard, but it is curated with the most garbage clickbait articles imaginable. Hopefully this move will be an improvement in that regard!
Wash, rinse, repeat! The online golden days are far behind us.
Stories like these are why I am willing to key a NYT subscription. Ohh, and the games too of course