I am an amateur computer historian, and I can confirm it went from good to shit. For instance, I run an archive at ps-2.kev009.com and there is an oldskool cgi search on my site (Xapian Omega). If you search IBM P/Ns or FRUs on G, versus on my site (for stuff my archive covers), you can see it first hand. My search is exhaustive and it is readily apparent G is not. I don't recall that always being the case, G started to penalize old content, http content, and all kinds of other stuff to the point of oblivion.

This makes me sad, because I will often have very exact queries like a part number and there is content out there on the internet that I cannot locate with search.