I'm a little tired of all these "Google search used to be better" feel-pieces that don't do anything to substantiate the claim beyond relying on the author's vague sentiment.
Technical searches on Google have become a pain in my ass. I'm constantly hit with low effort articles about topics that Google has guessed are similar enough but definitely aren't.
10-15 years ago, Google didn't have the same internet to crawl -- but it also didn't fucking _ignore_ what I asked for.
I was there. We used Altavista and Yahoo and they rocked. Until we tried Google.
You are also misconstruing what I said. I don't say I "don't really know" if it was better. I don't think it was better and seeing people baldly assert the opposite without proof hasn't convinced me my memory is wrong. I'd like to hear something better than "trust me bro." I'm tired of people getting published with evidence-free arguments (though I guess it beats someone condescending to me based on a wrong guess of how old I am).