Phrasing it as a UI shortcoming is underselling it. The search mechanism itself was dumb[1] and therefore the user had to be more intelligent. As an example, knowing synonyms for what you were searching for, in order to disambiguate the query from a more popular term that would likely dominate the results but was irrelevant for you, was a major skill.

[1] Yes, we can argue that LLMs are dumb, also. But they magically do "get" your intent with your prompt, unlike the search engines of yesteryear.