You touched on the fact that the AI right now is primitive and unable to parse regular english well - I agree that it still has a ways to go in this regard but,

You touched on the fact that the AI right now is primitive and unable to parse regular english well - I agree that it still has a ways to go in this regard but, while all of us complaining here might prefer the old google, we are the "in" crowd that actually put in the time to learn the old arbitrary rules. It isn't great to keep around arbitrary rules purely for the sake of consistency if those rules are bad. I think the fact that the search results are often unable to clearly distinguish different questions (and may return some autumn related results for "fall of rome") is a clearly bad thing - but the old format we're used to required a lot of learning and adaptation (the aforementioned "Google-fu") that shouldn't be a necessary skill for future generations.