If anything, it's an abandoned problem. A lot of companies bought really expensive enterprise search systems, which are sitting dormant because the results are so bad.

With advances in spamming, internet/email search is getting to be a harder problem every year.

I remember when Google was quite effective in finding what I need, but nowadays it's dismal. As an example, I googled for "storename return policy", and got page after page of results. All of them were tagged "missing storename", so just randomly picked return policies from other stores.

Search is their bread and butter, and they're probably keenly aware of the diminishing quality of results. I'd love to hear what's caused the recent trend for results that are missing a few of the most crucial keywords. Probably over-enthusiastically trying to filter out keyword farms.