You should see what searching was like on AltaVista. You'd have to scroll past dozens of posts of random numbers and letters to find anything legible. Click through and your computer would emit a cacophony of bell sounds and pour out screens of random nonsense and then freeze permanently. You had to rely on links and web-rings to navigate with any degree of success.
And that in itself was a massive improvement on what was available before.
Oh yeah I remember the AltaVista, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and Dogpile days. I agree searxh has come a long way. I'm just saying Google used to be better in that old sweet spot.
But now all of the internet got incorporated into a magic 8-ball and when it gives you it's random bullshit, you don't know is it quoting anon from 4chan or a scientific paper or a journal or random assortment of words. And you don't have any way to check it in confines of the system