The bigger problem is that you, as a user, don't have any control over internet search. Not only are you dependent on Google (or another provider) for what search commands you can execute, you also don't have no control about how these commands work nor on what subset of the database. Especially advanced features, complex queries, or power tools for searching are unavailable to the common user.
I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time).
I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?
What is lacking are easy ways to make vertical specific search engines. You are never going to make a better valuing algorithm than Google for general purpose search. A system designed by domain experts should be able to beat Google most of the time within their own tiny niche.
Yes. General search will give you general results. For day-to-day issues, like finding a nice restaurant in my neighborhood or some information of a device I own, it'll give everyone good results and that's fine. But once search become personal, i.e. about topics and issues you care about and (potentially) know a lot about, general search results aren't acceptable anymore as you know they're incomplete, not ranked accordingly to any meaningful measure given your understanding of the domain, and over-all the "generalness" of the results.
I have no idea about the (development of the) quality of the search query + results. I have no idea how to measure that (over time).
I suppose I could write a personalized search engine that runs queries I care about regularly on different engines, aggregate the results, write some code to analyze, monitor, and visualize all that, and start running my own valuing algorithms to determine the quality and depth of Internet searches. Space and computation power are cheap nowadays, so for certain well-specified domains, this might be feasible?