Search is a solved problem and Google could get back on top easily but 'on top' means two different things. For Google 'on top' means giving people the links that make them the most money, not what they actually searched for, (that's why there's so much spam and content farms and just garbage being served up) and for us (the end users) 'on top' means a search engine that gives us what we're actually looking for.
So Google won't change because for them they're already 'winning' but they've lost their core competency.
A new search engine needs to disregard the top x sites totally, anything that's optimised for SEO, just drop it. More images than text on a page? Drop it etc. There's so much internet out there that's buried under all this cruft that Google serves up. Most people aren't aware of more than 5 or 6 sites, but there's thousands.
if you want to know if it does it objectively, then you need to set an objective criteria - how do you measure it?
The main problem with search today is the plethora of built for SEO sites low content sites , what we need is good enough search w/ a banned list of sites maintained by the community so these types of sites can be removed from the index. I think the goggles feature will allow that.