[scholia]

It definitely isn't. I do a lot of searches at Bing now just because just entering one character will bring up a whole list of my previous searches, so I can re-use them. This is incredibly useful.

Google used to do that too, but killed the idea so it could provide crappy "instant" results.

Another thing that makes Google's search dramatically worse nowadays is the way it prioritizes "freshness" and de-prioritizes quality. It's now almost impossible to find any high quality results because the majority of the first few pages are taken up by rubbishy blog posts. Most of which are 5-line knock-offs of other blog posts.

The display of adverts on top of search results -- which deceives a lot of people -- is another example. When you look at the adverts and results that promote Google's own properties, there's less and less room for the organic search results that might actually be useful.

tl;dr -- Google search is significantly worse than it was three or four years ago.