I work at Google but not on Search. My guess is that it's because Google Search now also has to cater to queries from Assistant. Being required to handle web,

I work at Google but not on Search. My guess is that it's because Google Search now also has to cater to queries from Assistant. Being required to handle web, mobile, and assistant probably necessitated tradeoffs in quality of one over another. More generally I feel like as the company gets bigger it just gets much harder to handle all the complexity and keep things focused.