TL;DR: Google used to reach into the World Wide Web and deliver what I asked for, now it sells me what it has on hand in its stockroom. If I type terms that ma

TL;DR: Google used to reach into the World Wide Web and deliver what I asked for, now it sells me what it has on hand in its stockroom. If I type terms that map unambiguously to a result into 1998-201x Google, I get a well-regarded exemplar of that result as the first result, followed by less-trafficked exemplars of the same result, followed by things that are related to the result, followed finally by irrelevant results. It was so consistently good that I took it for granted for 15-20 years. If I do the same today, most of the time I get no relevant results on the first two pages. I get fresh results from popular or well-funded sources that happen to have a few of the search words, but are otherwise 100% irrelevant. It's like asking a shopkeeper for an orange, and they say "You're in luck! I bought way too much orange paint so I have tons of that in inventory. What do you say? Eh?" I always want the former. I never want the latter. I don't know how I can be any plainer. If that isn't specific enough for a would-be contender, then frankly that company doesn't belong in this space at all. If you think I'm looking at the past through rose-tinted lenses - that's fine, that's what they all say - but your search engine is still going to fail.