Lately Google has gotten so bad that I've even occasionally brought up Bing (which I've often referred to as the Zune of search engines) and gotten better results. It's looking more and more to me like Google has stopped trying to improve things and are simply milking their dominance for all it's worth.

Is that the key though? There's a lot of stuff I'd be quite happy if they didn't index!

Imo Yes, because that’s the main difference between Google search and everyone else. Out index Google, and it’s possible to beat.

That said, I do like the feature of ignoring entire domains. Google used to allow that