About 15 years ago I would sometimes spend hours on Google image search discovering childhood toys and filling in vague memories of locations or things. I tried this recently and it’s basically impossible. I actually get to the end of the search results in like 3 minutes and the quality is horrible now.

I think in a lot of ways Google peaked and is now on the decline into a profitable but much less relevant services company.

Google search is so bad compared to peak google.

Maybe the web is really that much worse, and the SEO tactics so hostile to genuine content.

But, honestly...just bring back the old google, where I have all kinds of search modifiers to perform exactly the search I want, that just returns all the matching results that have been indexed. Let me sort out the rest. How do you remove the ability to do "exact text search"? It's the most basic of search functions. Remember having "|" modifiers? AND modifiers?

If google launched that again, even as a separate engine, I think they'd have a good product again. Maybe being good doesn't pay the bills for google, though.

Yandex image search is a lot better now.