Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something), it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.
I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper "hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine for all of humanity.
Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..
That is the whole point, old Google was easy to replicate and therefore didn't cement their market position, if they still had that then why not just switch to Bing or DDG? New Google requires thousands of top level experts to tune and test things until it gives sensible results to stupid queries and is therefore impossible to compete with.