So why was google more effective before? Is this is product of the financial struggle of our society, or do you believe it is an inevitable consequence of a dominant search engine?
The task of search has gotten exponentially harder as well. There are billions more website pages, more spam, more sophisticated attacks, more gaming of the system, etc. They could have gone from a 80% relevant result to a 99% relevant result and you perceive at 10% drop in relevancy. It's a hard problem.