Lots of people here who were and remember being "good at search" and able to make exactly the thing they're looking for shoot to the top 3 spots on the results screen and being able to craft a series of searches such that, if they all failed, one could be pretty damn sure the information wasn't online or at least was hidden from the Google bot, neither of which are really possible anymore. The 100th time one attempts to find something on Google that one knows is there but just cannot get to show up no matter how many rare keywords one uses, one concludes Google has lost some pretty significant utility it used to have and starts to wonder what one is not finding when one doesn't know exactly the page one is trying to find.

(of course it may be better for lots of other things, but for a fairly large set of "finding things on the Web" tasks it's way worse than it used to be, to the point of being nearly useless—in part I think this is because sometime around 2008-2010 they stopped trying to fight webspammers, choosing instead to embrace some set of them provided they play by Google's rules, and downrank anything that wasn't "well-behaved" webspam or well-known sites hard)

I definitely remember a time when Google was much, much better at returning relevant results for technical content. My feeling is that there are (at least) two factors at play:

1) Google and other search engines revised their algorithms more than a decade ago. Instead of showing you results for what you searched for, they now show you what they _think you meant_ based on your search history and the search histories of millions of other users. This means searching for uncommon topics and phrases get you useless results. And you can't disable this functionality because it's baked into the core of how Google indexes and categories the content that it slurps up from the web.

2) Blogspam authors and e-commerce sites have gotten SEO down to a science, to the point where searching for nearly _anything_ not super specific no longer gets you _information_ about that particular thing, it gets you blogspam articles filled with fluff and affiliate links, or half-broken e-commerce sites trying to sell you something vaguely related to what you searched for. This is not technically Google's fault but there is a lot they could do to curb this, but all that ad revenue on those sites is how they earn that sweet sweet lucre.

> This is not technically Google's fault but there is a lot they could do to curb this, but all that ad revenue on those sites is how they earn that sweet sweet lucre.

That had been going on for years, but there'd be clear times when Google got ahead of it and results would get much better for a while, and because search was so much more precise it was possible to work around the spam. That those good times stopped happening and results are now a consistent and fairly high level of "spam-filled" by content that's seemed pretty much the same sort of crap for years, leads me to conclude they stopped trying. IIRC right around then they stopped the "no no, our ads our different and good, they're just text and always formatted the same way so it's easy to tell what they are" and became just another banner ad slinger.

[EDIT] just mined Slashdot for that last bit, looks like that happened around the last half of '07, which roughly checks out with my recollection of Google search abruptly getting much worse around '08-'09 then never getting better again.