Google either lost and surrendered or simply stopped caring about the war against crappy spam sites in search results sometime around '08/'09. Combining with a

Google either lost and surrendered or simply stopped caring about the war against crappy spam sites in search results sometime around '08/'09. Combining with a bunch of other things this led, IMO, to a reversal in what had been a steady increase in the quality of the web[1]. By around '11/'12 most of the web that wasn't crappy spam sites came to strongly resemble crappy spam sites. Anything like real, quality content not on a handful of major sites (e.g. Wikipedia) is either gone or impossible to find via search without knowing precisely what you're looking for. See also: all sites and news organizations everywhere embracing terrible clickbait titles over traditional, informative ones. [1] Like a massive jump in Javascript use and page sizes killing performance, and the expansion of Facebook/Twitter and the related death of the "no-one knows you're a dog" web.