I feel like you had to learn how to use it, operators and phrasing etc. They dumbed it down with search suggestions and even further by changing search terms to synonyms, and now outright ignoring terms. Height of Internet search was definitely pre 2008. More like 2005.

If you had the right query, yes. But getting there if you didn't know the exact words in the website used to take a number of attempts and google-fu. By early 2010s this was vastly improved.