Yes, Google has become worse because the problem is now much harder. I believe that Google's time is coming, because the fundamental idea of a single centralize

Yes, Google has become worse because the problem is now much harder. I believe that Google's time is coming, because the fundamental idea of a single centralized global search engine won't work anymore in a world that produces petabytes of new content every second. PageRank (or any other ranking algorithm) cannot compete with the massive economic incentives of SEO spammers and content writers in every niche and every language on the planet. Machine learning is even more susceptible to adversarial input. The time has come for a distributed, decentralized search engine powered by the immensely powerful devices in our pockets, with rankings determined by our peers and local network, not by a single global ranking. I'm not saying a distributed search engine with localized results will replace Google (you still want the global standardized search results in some cases), but rather we need a better alternative to simply asking your friends/communities like Reddit. The combined spare computing power of every smartphone on the planet is probably greater than AWS or Google Cloud could ever be. If people were incentivized to sell their spare battery/CPU/network capacity for web crawling, perhaps by earning money, this would solve the advertising/privacy problem with Google's business model as well.