Yes, I might have phrased that poorly. Google Search still finds relevant web pages just as well as it did 5 years ago, perhaps better. It certainly has leveraged the data it collects on me to suggest search terms in a way that's almost eerie.

But it's still a tool to find relevant pages, not a tool to find answers. It's made some progress with the semantic web and knowledge graph, but that still provides basic facts about people, places, and things. At its core, it's still a portal. It's still just a much better version of Excite. Search today feels like it did in 1997: a "solved problem" ripe for disruption. Google has the talent, technology, and data to produce something an order of magnitude better.

This. It used to be the first page of results was good enough. Now if it is not in the top 3-4, I refine my query.