An answer from me, during lunch break, sorry I didn't have time to make it shorter:

I started using Google somewhere between 2001 and 2003.

Back then it was a no brainer since all other engines either

- had much smaller indexes,

- were full of ads,

- mixed ads and results

- didn't respect your queries

Today Google:

- probably has the largest or second largest index (I'm not really sure about the NSA index : )

- yet you cannot get to the results you know are there because they insist on using you as a guinea pig for their AI that (roughly speaking) silently and transparently rewrites your question to something else that they rather want to answer.

- they have at least two ways to override this AI: doublequotes and the verbatim operator, -but conveniently let the AI override this too.

- if you end up in the wrong cohort you end up having yourself and your family insulted by their incredibly annoying ad targeting until you enable your ad blocker.

- up to half the pages are now ads

- and they keep experimenting with ways to make ads more visually similar to organic search

This is just the beginning, before we start talking about their lousy customer service, their eagerness to please China etc.

In fact, the quality is so bad now that Duckduckgo is just as good.

I'm optimistic though:

People keep blaming it on black hat seo and webspam but already we see a number of other engines doing interesting things in this space. I switched to a competitor recently and can happily say that what was supposed to be a brief test now seems to be a permanent solution: So far it feels like I have my Google from 2008 back (Decent index, smart matching, intelligent ranking ) and then some (lenses and various other smart features).