I wholly agree as to the poor recent performance of Google's search results. I was just recently looking for binaural audio (I have my doubts, but was curious) and the results Google returned were garbage, with many results hosting identical content. The scammers are currently winning, or Google has failed to continue to implement its core concept. That being said, in the search realm, this seems similar to what happened in the earlier days when Lycos promoted itself as having more indexed pages than any other search engine. That was a relatively easy hallmark to beat, so Lycos died rapidly. If someone else comes along with a much better search algorithm than Google at this stage, they just might have inertia like the early Google did. Or, more likely, the wealthy Bank of Google will buy them out.