I suppose back in 2010 it gave different results. I think Ursula's point was how opaque it was...

Oh wow I missed that this was from 2010. Seems just as relevant as today.

As someone who regularly looks up things I read "a while back," her experience is very common and insanely frustrating.

There always do exist magic combinations of words that you can put into google that will find the thing you're looking for. But the search space doesn't feel differentiable in a mathematical sense: you can't iteratively improve your terms because you either hit on a combo that works, or you get the same wrong results as you saw for your past 10 searches.