It would seem there's an opening for a new search engine

The root of Google's malaise is that the web is dying. If I go to yankees.com, I get a 403. The Yankee's official site is now mlb.com/yankees, i.e. they've signed on to the generic Major League Baseball portal and just have a stock database record there. Likely they did this because the cost to run an independent website has ballooned, with all the abuse prevention and detection, anti-spam, hacking & cybersecurity, people who are trying to do something illegal and use your website as a conduit for it, legal regulations, DDoS prevention, etc. stuff you have to do.

FWIW, this site is down about 2-3 screenfuls in Google, well below the fold, so Google isn't blameless here. The results above it are a sports onebox, news universal, and Twitter highlights, though, all about the Yankees/Phillies game tonight, so arguably they are showing what users actually are most likely to want to see.