I found it was easier and quicker to message the person who shared a doc with me and get them to resend the link than it was to use the Drive search.

Staggeringly bad for, you know, a search company.

yes, and that's what I normally do as well. I also bookmark docs that I know I am gonna access in the future. I just don't trust I will be able to find it again.

Google Search itself has become staggeringly bad so it fits.

Same here. 100-slide decks open without a problem for our entire org. And drive search is spot on 99% of the time. There are other issues, but these aren’t it.

I mean it's Google. You'd think they'd have nailed the concept of "searching" by now. :)

But I have found a weird workaround for this. After installing Google Drive File Stream locally and searching for things with the file explorer, it doesn't seem that bad all of a sudden.

Highly recommend https://slapdash.com which does a bunch of things - among which is finding files in gdrive insanely fast...