No, by "broken" I mean "let lazy auto-generated spam take over the results almost completely". So now those of us who did used to browse past page one (which, to be fair, may not have been many people) don't bother anymore.
[EDIT] For those who weren't around for it, Google used to play cat-n-mouse with spam-site operators. It'd go through cycles where results would slowly get worse, then suddenly a ton better, though never as bad as they are today. Around '08 or '09 they (evidently, I'm just judging from the search engine's behavior starting around then and continuing to this day) seemed to give up and just boosted a relatively small set of sites way up the results, abandoning the rest to the spammers.
Part of the difficulty is, if very few people are browsing to page 2, deciding what to put on page 2 becomes harder and harder.
Google has a lot of user behavior signals to decide what should be in results 1-10. Deciding if a page should be ranked 20, 200, or 2000 without any user clicks to check if you're right is really difficult.
I would bet that since 2008/9, the relative numbers of spam site operators, Google engineers, second-page searches have changed significantly.
[EDIT] For those who weren't around for it, Google used to play cat-n-mouse with spam-site operators. It'd go through cycles where results would slowly get worse, then suddenly a ton better, though never as bad as they are today. Around '08 or '09 they (evidently, I'm just judging from the search engine's behavior starting around then and continuing to this day) seemed to give up and just boosted a relatively small set of sites way up the results, abandoning the rest to the spammers.