Why are my Finder search results so terrible?

Is there a trick to getting accurate search results that I am missing? Every time I do a search, I get hundreds of irrelevant files from all over my computer, even when I specify where I'm searching. I can't make sense of the results and have not been able to fix the problem. It's almost as though search takes the word I search and finds it in every single document I have, including olds texts, messages, emails, and folder I have in my hard drive, and sends it back to me. They are completely unrelated to my search in every way.

These results are always around 80% NOT from the folder I am searching in. I have to scroll forever, sort and dig deeper to find one single document I know exists.

I have been gradually numbering my files using the Dewey system because Finder is useless to me, but in the meantime, I waste my time every day searching for stuff because of this glitch.

It's incredibly frustrating. I have followed every instruction in many different blogs and forums, and still, I get crap results. This seems to be a recent problem as I don't recall it being this bad in the past. I keep updated as always. What am I doing wrong?