Is it though? Google has dropped so much from its index these days it is no longer "just put that phrase you wrote ten years ago in quotes and the forum post will come right up". Smaller search engines obviously also suffer from this, but I do believe that peak previous gen are better than this

I feel like this is some real rose-colored glasses memories, I can’t even begin to agree.

My point is more that google of today undeniably has the resources to be that detailed, but they are actively choosing to dumb things down and use AI to figure out what I meant to search instead of just searching for what I tell it to, and they are actively choosing to drop things from the index when they could afford to index literally everything.

Well I definitely agree about that!

So I'd rather have something that tries and fails than something that actively shoots itself in the foot

Google exact phrase matching definitely feels like it has deteriorated.

I don't know how to estimate nostalgia but I've absolutely noticed google search results getting worse in the past 6 - 18 months. You'll see that the entire page of results is based off one misreading of a phraseology, not what you actually searched for. It feels worse in a "misguided" way, not in a pure deterioration way.

To be fair, the deterioration of search isn't wholly Google's fault. The web has become less searchable, because people try to game Google's metrics, which leads to Google trying to get clever to provide decent search results, which leads to deterioration of core functionality. I don't really see a good solution short of taking all the "SEO" specialists and their corresponding blogspam and throwing them into a volcano.

Way better? Dunno.

Lots of things I search for, result in a 1/2 page of "helpful google snippets", which quite often have no value, or are even completely wrong.

The next half, is then often SEO spam, pages just copying other pages, or mailing lists/forums.

This often fills the second page, too, along with the very links google pulled the snippets from.

This was sorta how Alta Vista was in the end days, page after page of junk.

I think Google is still better, but, it's a joke compared to over 2 years ago, and no, it's not SEO/spam.

They're just not putting effort into keeping up, and even benefit by ad placements on those pages.

Yeah... usually when I'm searching, I'm looking for something deep in the weeds, and what I get are really surface-level results. It's like I'm searching for some deep detail about how 3-phase grid voltage levels react to a severely imbalanced load per phase, and instead I get a bunch of junk about how to plug a lamp into a household socket without electrocuting yourself (totally made up illustrative example!). I truly think 1990s AltaVista was better at this kind of stuff than today's Google (but maybe not early Google).

I'm not arguing that the results are worse. Google is obviously more accurate with a larger index etc. But...

Ads. Google's SERPs are about 75% ads above the fold on a laptop. They're horrible.

Privacy. Everything you do on Google is tracked up the wazoo. It's pretty much impossible to stop too.

Share-ability. You can't share a Google search because personalization means everyone gets different results.

API access. Yahoo in particular had a really good Search API. You could search via the API and do things with the results. Google only allows you to embed an iframe to their site to display the results their way, with their ads. You can't search programmatically any more unless you pay a lot of money.