Google has been getting worse for the past few years, probably in the demands for making a standard product to suit the average person. But now the first page is full of results that exclude one of the search terms. And my strategy for years to find obscure results- of finding the oddest set of relevant terms to describe what I want to find to weed out commonplace results that share a couple terms — has stopped working almost entirely as Google's algo seems to have upweighted popularity considerably.

At this point I don't think it would be that hard to provide a useful alternative, especially with a business model where the customer is the searcher and not the advertiser. I'm not sure that all of those engineers are having an additive affect on the UI. Quite the contrary, I imagine many are working toward improving the experience for advertisers, who are the customers.