Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages wi

Whether search quality is deteriorating really depends what we expect from a search engine. Many of us on HN use search engine as a way to look for web pages with specific words. Search engines did start out performing word searches, but somewhere along the way, they started trying to answer questions. Many of the complaints such as Google dropping search terms are actually the result of the search engine trying to answer questions instead of performing keyword searches. Search engines these days are doing well for the easy questions, but of course they completely misunderstand questions with more nuances. A bit off topic: Some of the search queries in the article used Google like a keyword matching tool, while other queries in the article were using Google to answer questions. That's because we only have one search box trying to do everything. Would we be better served if we have a checkbox to tell the search engine that we just want to perform word searches?