There is an element of that but there’s also the reality that Google now blends ads in with the search results to the extent that there are sometimes no organic links “above the fold”.
I’m increasingly accidentally clicking ads on Google search. When it happens I’m sure I’m in an A/B test with ads in search results at the bottom of the page blended in to look like results.
Searching for products or manufactures is now increasingly impossible. Almost all the hits are ads for online retailers selling the product with the manufacturer’s page increasingly difficult to find in results.
The other one is everything is now “The best”. Every article surfaced is some low quality SEO post starting with “The best”.
Then tech searches bring up sites that have scraped stack overflow/GitHub duplicating content in a worse UI with ads/pop ups/redirects reminiscent of early 2000s filesharing website download link clicks. How these sites rank higher than the sources is a bit confusing.
Sites like medium locking content up so need to join to read it, Facebook groups killing forums have killed a lot of what made the internet/Google good.
It seems Google has less content it can index as content is locked away in private silos, the only freely searchable content is e-commerce sites and Google makes it money off the ads for ecommerce sites so those get pushed to the top of the rankings.
2. shitty personal coaching blogs and business blogs, that also have generic, bad content
3. somewhere in-between, like recipe pages that are stuffed with keywords, filler, and lots of ads
Google is the problem. AdSense creates an incentive to produce low quality content for the sole purpose of rankings. It's been the same for 20 years. No reason it is going to change. Second, google gives too much ranking power to old authority domains, like the sites mentioned above. These sites then use their authority to produce lots of crappy content that ranks well and fills up search results.
This can be fixed by having fewer sites in categories 1-3 fill top rankings. There are millions of webpages. you're telling me the same 1000 sites have to rank?
PageRank, when initially designed, was there to let things that are really valuable rise to the top.
As soon as Google became the top search engine, it was obvious that it's going to get gamed. And the arms race was on.
Google has not stayed on top of it, thus Google has gotten worse.
Internet, strictly speaking, has gotten better as it mostly is a superset of the old internet, but search results favour new content over the old one significantly.
A search engine that gave more weight to older stuff for things that are not in need of regular updates would probably resurface the good content of the old internet. But how out of date would it be?
Not my problem, but Google's. Thus, Google is worse.
