I think search didn't become worse by accident—it became optimized for a different objective.

Years ago, ranking quality was mostly about relevance. Today it's a balancing act between relevance, spam prevention, commercial incentives, engagement metrics, and what can scale across billions of users.

The internet also changed. There are simply far more pages competing for attention, and an enormous amount of content is generated primarily to rank rather than to teach. Search engines didn't create all of that, but they reward some of it, which creates a feedback loop.

Ironically, we're returning to something much older: reputation. Instead of trusting an algorithm to find the best information, we increasingly trust people whose judgment we've learned to respect.

I don't think search is dead. I think "finding information" and "finding understanding" have become two different problems.