I don't feel that's fair -- yes, Lynx is not really updated much anymore and at this point very niche. But it must work for their workflow, and I feel like something as critical as search should have fallback to work with very 'primitive' browsers and older W3 standards.

(FWIW I work at Google, but not on the search team. I might go looking at internal discussions to see if this is being looked at at all)