This is what everyone in this thread seems to be missing. Google is exactly as useful to me as it was 25 years ago, in fact much more so in fact by way of several orders of magnitude more information being available on the web.

About ten years ago I had to switch to consistently using double quotes for technical searches to raise the signal-to-noise ratio, but there are a huge number of contributing factors to that. I think we discount how much the rise of search engines as a discovery mechanism hurt the original PageRank algorithm. Things used to be easy to search for because humans were self-categorizing all the knowledge available (because we didn't have good search engines), and PageRank just made that self-categorization globally available.

Now there's so much more noise on the web, and no one is manually organizing it like we did with the old "web rings", and that's not even beginning to explore the issue of sites manually gaming SEO. The algorithm's job is much harder today, and so we need to give it a little help finding what we want.