Google (which started as a search engine, way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) is now increasingly working on _narrowing down_ the search options available to users.
"""A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things."""
One would expect Google to help IMPROVE search, not hinder it.
The appeal of Google, back in the days of Altavista, was in the fact that it could search various things, giving better results. Now it's intent on giving you fewer things to search.
That changed long ago. All the google is doing last two years is stopping projects, removing features and replacing acceptable GUIs by less practical ones.
"Now it's intent on giving you fewer things to search"
This intention is viable and supposedly helpful for users because we don't need millions of results back, which just does not make sense. We need fewer but more relevant results back with high quality information. This is hard to achieve.
Only some human-powered search engines can provide this much quality but they cannot cover a wide range of the web due to the resource constraints. Google always tries to use better algorithms to do this job better. So users are suffering from their experiments.
I agree if search engines can only do this much job is ok, don't need to be too intelligent, like the days back to AltaVista. Actually Google's PageRank and server farms killed it, while some meta search engines can help to provide a broader coverage. Now we are about the time to find better solutions: http://bit.ly/1fu5glK
