It does, though. The problem is that the most generally notable thing about a boring person who committed a serious crime 20 years ago is in fact the serious crime that they committed 20 years ago.

Put another way, if I put the name of my new neighbor into Google, the resulting webpage I would in fact most want to see as the result would definitely be the article on the murder they committed 20 years ago, even though they have a Facebook page that was updated 10 minutes ago. Facebook page can be result number 2.

If Google didn't show that result at all because it happened 20 years ago, and that person never did anything else notable more recently, I would consider Google to be a little broken.

Most people didn't commit murder 20 years ago but may have had a car accident or organized a loud party with weed while in college.

People change and your neighbor now has a family and lives quietly. It seems unfair the world should know him about his past mistakes

The same notability argument is still valid. It is not that search engines are broken, but the society which would view something that happened 20 years ago, while being the most notable fact about given person, as relevant for anything else than conversation-starter is broken.

This is a interesting point. You could imagine a partial simplistic solution that de ranked historical information for people unless it is specifically being asked for. It’s not clear that a search for a person’s “Bob Smith” nessacarily is interested in Bob’s 20 year old crimes, they might reasonably looking for things that person is currently doing like making music or writing or something else. This is the case when we search for celebrities. Now most people don’t have much interesting stuff on the internet so those old articles pop up. In fact those old arrivals typically have such low rankings that a common solution to this problem is to start a blog and be really aggressive about putting your name all over the place, if the point of Googling someone was to reliably find out if they have a criminal history from a long time ago you wouldn’t expect it to be so easily defeated.