And the downfall of AOL was Google because Google had a better product. In order for google to fall, you need a product that's better (or more of what people want; you need to give them a reason to change their search engine).
Their results have gone into the toilet - I ragequit Google search about once a day and do something else like forum searches.
Imagine you're searching for tail lights for your car or something, but you don't know the size, so you search "Astra tail light size". This might bring up headlights. Wrong but no matter, you'd go on to google "Astra tail light size -headlight -head" or something.
What Google seems to have been doing to me recently is ignoring those negated terms, ignoring quotes, and just giving me the same results again and again. It's really getting annoying. Google seems to assume it knows what I'm looking for, and that my search query is just completely wrong and not what I want.
Note that the car stuff is just an example, I'd expect Google to not give you headlights the second time. It generally but not exclusively happens to me when searching things that are more technical. ESPECIALLY when it's a consumer level thing I'm trying to get info on, Google likes to assume it's giving you errors and you're trying to fix it. Which makes sense for most users, but god it's frustrating when every combination of advanced search parameters you try does nothing!
Google search needs a checkbox or something to turn off it's cleverness and just do an actual search.
How likely a search time is "Yices", ffs? Feels like something that exotic ("statistically unlikely") probably is meant to be in the results by default.
This is SO annoying.
The problem is the business model breeds for this, and we end up replacing one abusive monopoly with another, until we can break that cycle.
For a time it seemed Free Software might ... free us ... from that, though as even that effort's biggest boosters (Eben Moglen, Bradley Kuhn, RMS) freely admit these days, we've been regressing of late, and at an increasing rate.
What's it going to take?