Eh, it happened pretty quickly and in the middle of a bunch of "we're making our search experience better!" stuff around the same time. I only gave a range beca

Eh, it happened pretty quickly and in the middle of a bunch of "we're making our search experience better!" stuff around the same time. I only gave a range because I'm fuzzy on the exact year it went to hell. Notably, the failure mode isn't that it finds a bunch of spam sites that happen to contain the keywords I want or have great SEO for those keywords, which is what one might expect if it were a wheat/chaff thing. In fact the more obscure and specific I get the more Google's results seem to try to wrestle me back to the middle, and the more it shows me page after page of blogging-as-income and similar lowish-value sites that are wildly far from what I was trying to get, and are in no way trying to masquerade as anything like the content I was looking for. I think the others don't go against this trend because they also don't want to spend more money fighting spam to try to salvage a use case / usage pattern that is at this point so old that a lot of Web users have never seen it work, and that many users even back then didn't use effectively. Those of us who relied on it heavily disagree strongly with the notion that Google only improves their search, though. For me it's much worse today—to the point of being entirely useless, in fact—for a significant percentage of queries I'd like to try against it, and noticeably worse though still usable for a bunch of others. It is definitely better at sending me to Wikipedia and at finding local restaurants or whatever, though, which is the kind of thing that probably constitutes 95+% of all queries against it (throw in people typing "example.com" into search rather than the address bar and it's more like 99%), so I'm sure their metrics look great.