I'm not even sure what killed it, but search is dead. Google used to be the best way to recall my old Slashdot posts. Now I can barely find a hand full from the last couple years. All the big search engines like that. The long tail of obscure corners of forgotten spider-web infested dank goth basement cheeto beer breath sites that used to make the Internet interesting has been un-linked from search. Dead.

You might as well just search Wiki, reddit, and a few other things now. AFAIK you can't keyword search the Wayback Machine. We'd need something like that to make search what it was until just a couple years ago.

99% of all hits returned from search now are just hot ad-infested garbage that wants you to page through dozens of auto-playing videos arbitrated by 30 or more 3rd party JavaScripts loading 50 megs of potentially malware laden garbage, in the vain hope of getting the 142 bytes of text that would supply you the answer.