You don't remember what a game-changer Google was back in 2000 or so. Its results are pretty awful now, probably because of Goodhart's Law, but they were such a huge improvement over Jeeves et al..

An interesting exercise that most reasonably competent programmers can do now is to setup their own websearch engine with Common Crawl, Elastic MapReduce, JSoup or Gumbo or equivalent HTML parser, and ElasticSearch. It costs on the order of high-hundreds to low-thousands of $$$ to process the ~2B webpages in the Common Crawl corpus (about half the size of the first tier of Google's index) and stand up an ElasticSearch cluster with it for a few days.

You too can build your very own search engine. Unfortunately, the result quality is roughly what AltaVista was like in 1995. That is why people keep going back to Google.

I remember when Google came into being and how amazed I was. It was quite something totally different and I switched and never looked back for a lot of years.

In recent years however I tend to massively agree with your sentiment and experience. Every day I do not find the things that are really helpful on page 1 - 3, sadly.