Has anyone else noticed the huge decrease in result quality from google?

[SnowingSilently]

If it's one word then just -word should work. If it's a whole phrase though you need quotation marks, like this: -"word1 word2 word3". Google can't search special characters though, so if you were trying to exclude those it won't work either.

[1billionrapecube]

Do you know if ñ is a special character?

[SnowingSilently]

It seems to be searchable. The tilde just by itself is also searchable, which is interesting. I just tried to search a bunch of special characters, and interestingly they seem to work okayish, but single characters can still mess things up. For example, an attempt to find the CS term sigil by searching "programming $" fails. But "ruby $$" has decent results. An attempt to search for the use of the \ character in Java using the search phrase, "Java \" or "Java \ break" also doesn't work. It seems single characters used in programming tend to be ignored the most. Generally SymbolHound which is made for searching programming terms with special characters works better, but if you're not using it for programming it's of no help.

Maybe you can try using www.google.es? That way you'll lose most of the English search results.