Did you notice that the world's most popular search engine has been almost entirely a facade for over 5 years now?
Not just a 'left leaning' or 'ivermectin censoring' engine, but an engine that is almost entirely an illusion.
The publicly accessible version of Google Search now has less than one-hundred-thousandth of the web searching ability it had in 2005.
Did you even notice?
Did you notice that nearly every other search engine (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo... even Russia's Yandex) is a similarly fake search engine?
Want more details?
Here's a post and a video from a couple of noticers.
OP's five orders of magnitude seems about right. Archie and Veronica (search tools) were supposed to provide everything everywhere, and Google started with that approach and over time realized that its algorithmic results were not hurt by indexing everything and selecting from the index (total resources are indeed a limit but not that much of one), and over more time all its woke filters got worked into that algorithm. Getting 100-300 max results on any item is insanely wrong and not search. One would think the market would intervene ....