I think it existed before 2010. But then, several Google services have improved since 2010. (Not search though...)

It's hard to remember exactly what result quality was like in 2010, but I'm very satisfied with the utility I get form Google search. I can throw a dozen different oddball questions at it and either get the answer directly (without even needing to click through to an often slow and cluttered page), or get what I was looking for as the top result. They do all this in an extremely adversarial environment where "SEO" people spend the majority of their effort trying to boost their pages for specific words.

Google is manipulating search results in bad faith: It has admitted engaging in political censorship of results to divert traffic away from undesirable sites.

Also, it seems to have a bias in favor of the larger websites generally, but this is an anecdotal observation of mine, there may or may not be evidence to support it.