I've been ruminating on the sad state of the Web's search infrastructure over the holidays. I'd love to hear which of your search use cases is no longer and/or poorly supported by the surviving search engines.
I'm aware of:
- searching for academic papers is getting increasingly difficult on Google
- Bing seems to be the only search engine left with an API, and it isn't cheap
- few fine-grained search operations are still supported by Google
- Google's widget to provide search for your own site looks increasingly like an inconvenient afterthought