Search is in fact so hard that even with all the improvements mentioned in the article, searching Google today is only marginally better than searching Alta Vis

Search is in fact so hard that even with all the improvements mentioned in the article, searching Google today is only marginally better than searching Alta Vista in 1997. I still type into the same user interface I did nearly 20 years ago: a search box. I still get results in the same form I got them then: a paged list of ranked items. And even on the first page, the list is still full of irrelevant results, though nowadays they are more likely to be intentional content spam than an accidental result of the search algorithm itself. I'd peg the overall improvement at no better than 20 or 30%, which is astonishingly little given all the research dollars at the disposal of companies like Google and Microsoft. Search must be very, very hard indeed.