Comment by kderbyma

search engine's stopped focusing on search and behind the scenes became select engines and they would do the searching in advance.

this was probably sometime around 2012 when the first big hacking scandals on the web that were causing mainstream media to focus on them and those places were routinely pointing out using basic search modifiers in Google to find. Google pulled all the useful operations and neutered their search functionality. Then they worked with a variety of different interest groups to steer the discussions and search results online for optics and political reasons and actively started to monitor and change search queries and inject not just ads but additional content based on various factors.