Yeah, if anything, the "AI" part of the search has been part of the decline. Google aggressively gives me what it thinks I want rather than what I ask for. It seems like it's very clever in giving me something like what an entirely average person would likely want if they mistakenly typed the text that I knowingly and intentionally typed ("Kolmogorov? do you mean Kardashian?" etc).
The search does seem able to understand simple sentences but there's much less utility in that than one might imagine. Just consider that even an intelligent human who somehow had all of the web in their brain couldn't unambiguously answer X simple sentence from Y person whose location, background and desires were unknown to them. Serious search, like computer programming, actually benefits from a tool that does what you say, not what it thinks you mean. Which altogether means they're a bit behind what Alta Vista could give in the Nineties but are easier to use, maybe.
Part of the situation is the web itself has become more spam and SEO ridden and Google needs their AI just to keep up with the arms race here. So "Two cheers" or something, for AI.
They seem a bit better at dealing with search spam than they used be. I was searching for a something in ho chi minh the other day and got a spam site saying "where to get <thing> in ho chi minh" where they'd produced similar pages automatically for all cities in the world pointing to their stupid online site, and kind of got nostalgic - I hadn't seen that kind of spam for a year or two and it used to be constant.
Sometimes I get the vibe that it's a weird self-fulfilling prophesy of terrible SERPs. You reward freshness too much, so then people play that game. But you also punish duplicate content at the same time so the best content, if it already exists but is not fresh, naturally has to fall off.
That is pure nostalgia talking. I strongly suspect that if you did you would be appalled and want to switch back after only a few searches. Search in 2016 is leaps and bounds beyond what it was in 2006.
If the internet was 1 page 10years ago today it is 10 million pages. So today Google search is a lot better. Its not that Google search has detiorated its the web that has to much useless data.
I still am able to find what I am looking for in the first 5 results for most things. 10 years ago had to go to the 2nd or 3rd page for some obscure queries. Now it's a lot better at answering direct questions as well instead of just giving results.
I would argue that you need to evolve with the software. Google search isn't the same anymore. Intellectual Darwinism, Evolve or become irrelevant. You can't search the way you used to or you'll get crappy results. If you don't want to be limited by your Google search bubble then search in anon mode.
