It was mostly better.

The competition for many kinds of search terms is causing a race to the bottom. E.g. tech docs, lyrics, recipes, reviews.

That’s why Kago has a lense for “non-spammy recipe searches” — there’s just so much noise on popular, easily copyable material.

You don’t get the best site by popular vote like PageRank was known for, you get the one that generates the most ad revenue.

It was an honest attempt on the crawlers' part and it was a more level playing field. If you didn't find what you wanted on lycos, you could look on Yahoo or Alta Vista or WebCrawler or something instead. For a time there were meta Search engines that allowed you to search other search engine amalgamated results.

Yeah, you had your choice of several awful results and everyone couldn’t shut up about how good Google was when it was available. If people mean “Google used to be better” I’m willing to entertain the idea, but you’re out of your mind if you miss using Altavista and Dogpile.

You're comparing Google how it was then. Not how it is now

With Google right now I find what I am looking for almost all of the time. I can’t say that about the golden oldies you’re praising.