Or maybe even a year at least. I don't understand why Spotify no longer displays specifically something you searched for - this problem has been going on consistently for quite some time, except for a brief period when the search results seemed to have reverted to the old kind. At first this occurred only in the desktop version, but it's happening in the mobile one as well.
Unless you search for a completely nonsensical string, Spotify will mostly display results that have nothing to do with what you're looking for, apart from artists/song titles that share an identical or similar combination of letters. The number of results will stretch to at least 100, often as much as 1000 (but no more). In the old search engine you could even narrow it down by putting a song title (or part of) in quotes like in Google, but here it seems to make not a jot of difference.
You might well say if you don't find what you're looking for within the first 20-30 results the chances are it isn't on Spotify, but there have been one or two cases where I did find a match (or close to one) after much scrolling down. A prime case in point was when I was searching yesterday for Bach's Mass in A Major, but I had to scroll past many tracks of the far better known Mass in B Minor before I could find a recording of that work. I'm sure that wouldn't have been the case with the old search function.
Any suggestions as to what we can do to make Spotify bring it back, because it is making searching for the more obscure stuff really cumbersome and time-consuming (at least in the past you knew where things stood when you knew instantly if it wasn't there). After adding very few if any songs over the last year or so to my playlists, I have been seriously thinking of cancelling my Spotify premium subscription which I have had for more than ten years on more than one occasion and writing to Spotify to complain about this.