For a while now I've been noticing that Google's ability to deliver results that I care about in search slots 3-X seems to have decayed in the face of SEO spam, realtime clutter, and other distractions. Assuming I am like most people (who don't even look beyond the first page of results), this means that the Google product is now delivering about 20% of what it could. Seems like an astonishingly low hit rate for a brand that built on the premise of being a better mousetrap.

This might explain the attempt to add knobs with the latest redesign that might better target the rest of the results. And yet, the time filter, which I had thought would be really useful to surface out of the advanced query page, seems to be relatively weak in terms of making better use of slots 3-10 on the first page. And what is worse, the overall widget has given Google the feel of a Windows 95 control panel.

I'm not a big believer that search is dead by any stretch of the imagination. The social graph, app stores, Q&A services— you pick your favorite disruptor for the traditional method for discovery— I can come up with a whole mess of queries that just will not fit the model (some of which are among Google's most profitable). But I do think that the company needs to pay attention to this 20% hit rate and focus on that more than on the rest of the new shiny toys everyone keeps clamoring for them to build