Google is a victim of its own success and of the increasing global accessibility of networked communications. If 90% of the American search market were split between 5 companies of roughly equal popularity, the ROI of gaming ranking to trick any one of those implementations would be much lower. There would be fewer people who could make a living by faking relevance/quality signals for junk.

Right now the best paying job many people with unspecialized skills can get is "tricking people into clicking things they shouldn't." Google is sorely taxed trying to keep up with the antics of a million people whose career is trying to game Google. Early Google was better because the people really desperate for money couldn't even afford to get online. That was a glaring inequity that doubled as a crude spam filter [1]. I think about this every time a real live person telephones me on behalf of "Windows Support."

[1] This is a large part of what I miss when I'm pining for the early Web. Practically everyone publishing online then had to be either more affluent than average or cleverer than average to get into Club Web. People contributing on the early Web were almost all financially situated independent of what they were contributing, so Web participation was almost all done out of passion rather than financial desperation. Authors didn't worry about how to get paid for what they wrote online and readers didn't worry about how to support their favorite sites either. People in the club were understood to have other means of sustenance. If you didn't, you wouldn't be in the club in the first place!

This is quite far from being the whole truth IMO.

First: the problem isn't websites made by poor people. My biggest waste of time is ordinary quality but utterly irrelevant results.

Second: very often the problem isn't like before where websites included valuable search terms in white text on white background but rather that Google includes results that never included the search terms at all.

These are entirely Googles fault I think for over-optimizing for quantity instead of quality, not the fault of black hat SEO.

Yeah, being successful has its problems, as everyone wants to game your search engine, but what has that to do with the changes they made to make their search almost impossible to refine.

Operators are basically useless, they may or may not be respected, I can't select results from discussions like there was before, etc.

So basically google decides what to do with my imput, I have no saying on what I really want, so I have to deal with lots of crap.

I'm really one of those lazy users, and I find myself using other search engines more and more, just because this reasons, and despite their "normal" results being worse than google.

This is specially bad in Spanish. There aren't many alternatives in Spanish and sometimes drives me crazy. To the point that I looked into crawling myself some sites and put some OS search solution on top (I'm poor and It's a lot of work, so I didn't finally).