You can't have "2010 levels of efficacy" on 2026 web.
I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.
>Information retrieval has never been closer to the ideal of: "ask a question -> get the answer".
Again, for people who actually used the internet in 2010, I don't believe this is a real sentiment.
OR
It's never really been farther, either.
It is especially so the farther you stray from things the average person wants to know. The beauty of Old Internet and Old Google was that it connected you with niche experts, and quickly, instead of a hyper-compressed bag of guardrails quasi-possibility (if you have enough credits) over a grueling campaign of "placate the robot's idiosyncrasies".
Do you know what inspired this post? A 10-minute odyssey of asking Google Search's AI for help finding a particular option on a particular website. Every response after the first began with, "My mistake, you're right," and at the end, I still didn't have the answer.
I much prefer Google today than in 2010. I very rarely look at web pages (full of all kinds of bad design, unnecessary text, and ads) now. Google gives me the information directly.