In May of 1998, I published a review of Lou Reed's "Perfect Night" by Kevin McGowin, and when I google (in FF private mode, as if that helps) "lou reed kevin mcgowin" it comes up #1.
If I google "lou reed perfect night review", I stopped looking after page 17 of results. There's just too many results.
If I google /"lou reed" "perfect night" review/ with quotes as you see them, the review I published is on page 2, result #3.
I feel your pain, but, as someone who started publishing content in 1995, I don't see Google as having a memory problems.
My pain points are related to how Google crawls my content, my sitemaps, and how the two seem completely independent of each other.