I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now). The "search experience" however, has deg

I'll echo this: search, in a purist sense, has definitely improved (just looking back to the mid 90's through to now). The "search experience" however, has degraded since the mid 2010s, for me at least. I'm in a constant battle to filter through advertising and bad content that is "optimized" for the algorithm to find the information I need. The constant need to monetize the technology more and more has certainly reduced it's usefulness en-masse. But I don't think chatbots or alternatives (beyond curated indexes) will solve this problem - as you say the web itself has morphed around ways to optimize one search engine's ranking algorithm.