In 2001-2003, browsers crashed every 5 minutes then and Google's search didn't crash nor freeze nor slow it due to not being covered in ads and popups (having only 1-3 ad results at the top of the page with green text was a massive improvement). On tech forums back then, people would say, "is this even sustainable?"
Microsoft search and the other ones were just "there was an attempt" tier and gave complete nonsense results. When Google debuted, it was the only time web search substantially improved. There were no other big innovations in web searches ever, from that day on.
> These days you can just throw stuff at it like “that movie about the depressed guy with a plane engine that falls on their house”
I have looked for obscure queries like yours for 10 years and have not found them. For example "that movie where police vehicles are dispatched and they all crash for seemingly no reason on the way to the scene". It just won't find it because nobody talked about it (in a manner that would cause words that stick out to match), simple. And now days it's even worse because it does that new "rounding" thing and gives me:
- The 25 Best Police Movies of All Time
- Dispatched (2014)
That first result simply contains nothing to do with my query other than the world "police" and "movie".
Now days when you try to use a web search, you can't be smart and search strings that are likely to be used by someone discussing your topic of interest anymore, because it will always "round" them. It will also look at each word as if they are the literal thing you are in search for. I don't know if it's still possible to search bodies of text to get around that, but I'm not sure if that feature even ever worked. Back in 2005 when all these people were raving about intitle: inurl: inbody: whatever, none of them worked consistently, and you would also get scolded for hacking if you used them "wrong". Even searching something like "powered by phpbb" got me banned or scolded once when I wasn't even using it for hacking but rather as a workaround to narrow my search to only forum websites.