Did Google just throw out yet another tubload of babies with the bathwater?

For my Art Nouveau related website I was doing research on a German architect Emil Kärn. When I type "Emil Kärn architect" (with no quotes) into Google here's what I see: the hit #1 is a page that doesn't even contain either "Emil" or "Kärn" and obviously has absolutely no relevance to the query (WTF, Google?). Most of the rest of the hits have nothing to do either but a few are about buildings built by Emil Kärn - simply mentioning him by name with no biographical info. Someone who believes that if something is not on Google then it simply doesn't exist (that would describe me up until recently) would conclude that there's no biographical info on Emil Kärn online, right? But type the exact same query into DuckDuckGo or Bing and discover at least FOUR pages specifically dedicated to Emil Kärn, containing his dates of birth and death, the list of buildings he designed etc. None of those are on Google at all (anymore). How on Earth could that be possible? As Google won't comment on the specifics of its ranking algorithm, I can only speculate that it's probably because all those pages do not contain any sort of text in them. But for this specific category of websites (database/directory) it's by design, not by omission or laziness. They are not supposed to have any coherent text which does not make them any less helpful to people doing specific factual research. But Google in its justified fight against crappy, SEO-oriented "unhelpful" texts apparently equalized "no text" with "shitty text" thus throwing a whole category of websites off the index. Or maybe it means that all "niche" content that is not widely popular, is out for good? In other words, if your query is not about Taylor Swift or what's going on in Syria, forget about Google and switch to Bing/Duck? Is there any hope for us users doing serious research on the web and for us site owners whose websites dropped off the face of Google overnight? Yes, I'm running a database website myself but I don't want to make it about me because clearly I am not the only victim, there's a whole category of websites that got de-indexed by Google recently. What do you think? Did you have a similar experience? Do you agree with my wild hypothesizing or do you have another explanation? Do you think there is any way for us to get through to Google with this problem? Do they even care?