I miss the old Google, back before it got gamed and curated to hell, and it felt like you could find what you wanted to find as long as it was on the net.
I used altavista long after google had become the hip new thing. I liked it, because for certain searches I knew what results I would get back. Which is to say I knew how to look for things I wanted to find.
Google was smarter but seemed less intuitive to me to get at what I wanted.
I do... being able to craft a query that returned _just_ what you wanted and not having to wade thru 10 pages of results because 'page rank' put all the really good stuff on page 5+....
Seconded. With increasing frequency Google returns pages and pages of totally irrelevant results.
It's as if they don't care about search result quality as much anymore.
I think its half 'dumbing down' search, and half greed to push as many ads as possible...
I wish they would enable an advanced mode or something.