> I guess there's just too much data now to search stuff like that.

That seems extremely unlikely as the reason.

It's far more likely that some executives looked at the numbers and decided that removing search operators would make people more likely to click on ads, while leaving them in would make people click on the actual results that they were searching for.

It's not only actual clicks, it's impressions too.

make search worse = more searches are performed = more ads shown

It's anti-consumer but every company is like this now.

i was being glib. Of course it's possible to have functional search for people that remember the good old days of google dorks and switching search engines to find deeper links. That's gone away, for the reasons you and sibling(s) mentioned - ad revenue.

I am unsure if it is possible to run a "free" web search without having a benevolent benefactor paying for the scraping and maintenance and staffing. Furthermore, someone has to play mouse and mousetrap with the "gaming" of whatever "algo" one chooses to use to rank results. Maybe a list is the wrong way to display search results. maybe a contemporary snapshot of the page with the search text highlighted might work better. It might even convince a lot of sites to clean up their landing pages and their blog/article formats.

I know how to stand up and start a web search engine, and probably could implement a decent chunk of functionality myself. it'd be slow and fall down if 100,000 people hit it at once, but nonetheless, the hard part isn't getting one running and starting the scraping. The hard part is results and funding.

I envisioned, last night, in a fever dream: maybe some metadata that the crawler and the sites share, to encourage Value for Value. If a site is willing to be scraped, but would like some nominal bandwidth costs recouped, or perhaps some sort of data agreement that is mutually - mutually - beneficial; or a site like NYT chipping in to the search hosting costs if the search company has really good results, like better than NYT could implement, then there could be some value for value there, too.

Search engines provide a valuable service for humanity, as a general concept. Search engines as they exist now provide a valuable service for their shareholders. remove the shareholders, make the service valuable for humans, and the human stakeholders in the search company (employees, vendors, etc) might not be so greedy or "legally obligated to make numbers go up".

Encarta and Britannica existed. Wikipedia exists - as well as the forks and archives.