What Happened to Search?

I'm sure you've felt it, over the past few years. The slow creep of increasing inaccuracy, dumbed-down filtering parameters, results lists that are impossibly small for the query, and frustratingly focused on high-Alexa-ranking sites. What is happening? It's become impossible to find anything of use, let alone what you were looking for, whether you're using a general web search like Google or DuckDuckGo, or site-specific searches on reddit, SoundCloud, YouTube, and the like.

It wasn't like this, 10 years ago. Obscure queries were almost always fruitful, whether you knew what you were looking for or not (and especially if you know exactly what you were looking for). Now, verbatim searches are don't work. Booleans are broken. You have the choice of searching through the last day, week, month, or year, or all of recorded digital history; no in-between.

Doesn't anyone know? Don't we have someone in this community who's willing to jump under a green screenname and spill? At least give us the dignity of knowing why, after a mere two decades, the opening of humanity's knowledgebase to the average person is closing again.