Google is not interested in serving us the "best" search results possible, they are interested in serving us their customers ads. In other words, Google search results are crap, because Google wants them to be crap.
Like I said though, maybe they are just riding their wave (dominance) at this point, but then I'd expect to see better results from a scrappy competitor already or soon. Here's hoping, but even as a discerning user, I haven't yet.
I'm confident that even if Google doesn't solve it, for whatever reason, someone else will eventually. In the meantime, results continue to degrade and the desire / reward to fix it will increase.
I have no idea if that's even possible. The number of people who (a) Google pays to be the default engine for and (b) aren't even aware there are other engines is huge. If the various google search domains went offline, the number of people who wouldn't even be able to find facebook is probably a double-digit percent, let alone those who cannot figure out to fail over to bing, ddg, yahoo, whatever.
That competitor simply doesn’t exist yet, and I think that’s because no one has figured out how to beat Google at search (which is why I think real ingenuity is required).