The Core

All the more reason to move away from anything Google even quicker than before.

Quote

15 percent of queries are ones we’ve never seen before.

I guess the toolbar and autocomplete have helped homogenise queries, IIRC the last time I heard that stat 3-4 years ago it was closer to 25%

They did away from the Google Instant forced auto-complete stuff a year ago
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-removes-instant-search-desktop-web-search-engine-2017-7
so perhaps this number could move back up to 18% to 20% in a few years.

Also, if they know you are a Cubs fan and show that sort of information by default on the search homepage on phones then maybe for some of the most common navigational or informational queries some of them will have fewer queries by becoming queryless results.