[Pamar]

I am not the OP but I interpret "research is stuck" as follows:

Remember Altavista (and similar search engines from the era?) it worked, but everyone was using the same approach so you got the same results when you searched for a given word... Then Google arrived and the quality of their results looked like magic.

In terms of "user experience" today does resemble then: Bing, DuckDuckGo... They return a subset of what Google finds, not something qualitatively better.