Chrome might just be the best piece of software that I use daily, and I didn't have to pay a dime for it. Big kudos to Google. Chrome is my second favorite product of theirs after Google Search (hmm, and Gmail might be tied in second place - hard to decide).
I wonder if it's possible that your usage of search has changed in the past 2-3 years? Could it be that the difficulty of your searches has increased faster than Google has improved?
Someone will suggest duckduckgo I'm sure but it doesn't really work well for me and my usually obscure searches
I must agree however that google is getting harder and harder to find what I want and more often than not searches are returning way too many blogs with minimal content and excessive ads just fishing for views.
Hrm, the built-in PDF viewing must not be on the Ubuntu PPA (Didn't see an option for it anywhere either)
Also, I'm not sure how the bookmark sync works. I set it up on one instance of Chrome, then on my other computer, it over-rides the first instance, removing some and merging others. I don't really know what it did, but it seemed kind of inconsistent. But of course, I was using a daily
I think it happens when you manually update it on browser, after adding few bookmarks. Let the sync take care of it. It happened to me couple of time, now it works fine. Syncing among Windows,Linux and OSX dev channel.