I also had this experience. However, I now feel all search engines are returning worse results. Very rarely can I find anything meaningful outside of major content providers. Everywhere my results are filtered through a local government lens. In many ways it feels like search on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, closed appstores, etc. have become the new defacto content aggregation mechanisms, and those are tending toward feeds and curated content rather than requiring active search. The best and most meaningful results on most actual search engine results pages are Wikipedia excepts, or trivial widgets (currency or unit conversion results, weather forecasts, etc.). I don't have any objective measures and am unlikely to be a representative sample but I feel I am searching less, my browser has become a URL-bar based memory system, the traditional 'home page' notion has been replaced by a Firefox auto-curated most-frequent-sites list, and I use traditional search engines more like a command line than a library index. OTOH we now have Library Genesis which is brilliant.