My memory of Altavista was that it was great for discovery of obscure but interesting sites. Sure, you might have to go through 10 pages of results to find one, but the experience was one of serendipitous discovery. It's lack of precision (in favor of recall, making it seem less winner-take-all, SEO-optimized) seemed to correlate strongly with the notion of "surfing" the web. (And the use of the phrase "web surfing" likely declined as Google, and later, the app economy, rose.)

I am not the OP but I interpret "research is stuck" as follows:

Remember Altavista (and similar search engines from the era?) it worked, but everyone was using the same approach so you got the same results when you searched for a given word... Then Google arrived and the quality of their results looked like magic.

In terms of "user experience" today does resemble then: Bing, DuckDuckGo... They return a subset of what Google finds, not something qualitatively better.