It has certainly gone waaaay south since day 1, that much is undeniable. Of course, a large part of that is that the internet has gotten a lot more useless fill

It has certainly gone waaaay south since day 1, that much is undeniable. Of course, a large part of that is that the internet has gotten a lot more useless filler in those years, and this has of course made 'relevant search' an astronomically harder problem than it was in 1998. On the more important metric of 'has quality gotten worse in the last couple of years', I would say 'sort of'. The direct quality of results HAS suffered, but on the other hand, google have implemented the user-wiki thing that allows you to modify, to a degree, which sites are less relevant. I will add that I think google needs to rethink it's keyword fuzziness, in the past it used to be acceptable if the results didn't exactly match what you were searching for, but these days that is becoming more of a problem. If I search for a bunch of words, I typically know I want those words, by all means suggest 'did you mean ... ?' but the fuzziness in the results needs to be pulled back.