I suspect in the coming years the Wayback Machine at archive.org will become ever more important - always assuming it's not lost as collateral damage in their copyright battles. Indexing that dataset and making it searchable would massively increase its value.

My inner conspiracy theorist can't help wonder if the continued reduction in search usefulness isn't part of an ongoing deliberate disempowerment of everyday people - but my rational side says it's merely an unfortunate emergent behaviour of the systems we've built.