[dbrueck]

> And because the majority of people have a better experience, I dismiss your second option of other factors being at play.

That's fine, though the point I was (clumsily?) trying to make was that there are different factors here that allow multiple things to be true at the same time: power users routinely feel like search result quality is going down, and I think you can pretty objectively show that to be true in many cases.

Simultaneously, though, the barriers for "normal" people to do decent searches have dropped dramatically - there was an accessibility hurdle that was previously challenging for a lot of people and it's incredibly better now vs just a few years ago. This too, I believe, can be shown to be objectively true in many cases. (anecdotally as well - just last week I watched a number of very un-technical senior citizens get what they wanted out of Google and I didn't see much evidence that it was because of their skill at crafting good search queries).