It's still the best, but the profit motive is harming the amazing work that Google once did.
First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.
Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.
Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".
I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".
I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.
[1] https://twitter.com/riiiiiiiikk/status/1012859335095959552
I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."
But my gut says that it's not that google is defending the sanctity of such results, but that those results are an annoyance and not a real threat, so are just off the radar. When someone with enough sway wants them gone, I've got no doubt they'd be nerfed too.
Your complaint about their service is that they've made it more difficult for you to break the law?
> Certain words & phrases I know would produce legitimate useful search results in 2008 will now just pull pages of unrelated ads.
A person asked for examples. I delivered examples. I'm not contesting that the search is illegal in some jurisdictions. Merely pointing out that there are searches for which google used to return results with utility, and now intentionally do not return such results, and fall back to irrelevant suggestions.
Although the comment I made said more than what you implied it to, I will explicitly make the complaint you're mocking: Yes, I am unhappy that such results are censored. But it's not merely "I want free albums". I want to be able to search the internet. Not someone else's ideas of what the internet ought to be. It's a legally and ethically difficult problem, to be sure, but I think mocking the idea of supporting searches that the government dislikes is a step too far.
The Chinese and US governments' censorship regimes are not equivalent in magnitude, so it's not fair to compare them simply, but just as we can entertain the idea that the chinese are unfree in their searches for information, and as a result the breadth of what they can think about and experience, let's recognize that so too are we in the western world.
I don't mind that they're blocking rom sites. I do mind that they don't have the courage to just say "We're not going to return anything for those terms".
That was also true when search results were purely based on terms entered, barring the domain name affecting the default language, and user configuration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble
> A filter bubble – a term coined by Internet activist Eli Pariser – is a state of intellectual isolation that allegedly can result from personalized searches when a website algorithm selectively guesses what information a user would like to see based on information about the user, such as location, past click-behavior and search history. As a result, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles.
I remember when was totally normal to settle how a word was spelled by looking what spelling had how many results. I'm not saying that wasn't silly, but I actually remember people actively using that "consensus reality" in forums, all the time. "how did you find that", "I entered X and then it was the third result", "oh yeah I see, thanks". The traditional exception was things blocked on youtube in various countries, but otherwise we took it for granted that if you visit a certain public URL, you get the page someone else would get.
That doesn't mean one confuses those Google search results with reality anymore than every person in the cinema seeing the same movie means they confuse it with reality. It just means that experience is part of the common world they inhabit. When I go into a library, the selection of books there is rather arbitrary, but that's still very different from there just being a clerk who might recommend one book to me, to then lie to someone else and pretend to not know that book.
One difference between Google and an old-fashioned library: however arbitrary the collection was, you'd always find the canon, the best selected by the people who could reasonably be expected to know the best. Today, especially on YouTube, there is no canon, no conception of best at all. It's just whatever Google selects according to the signals it deems likely to keep you watching.
https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear 397.000.000 results
https://www.google.com/search?q=nucular 172.000 results
Which obviously still works, but it was just the most simple example of "search engine consensus reality" I could think of.