> Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago.

> Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible. They use to fight the spam, though, and you could still find obscure-but-relevant sites. Not 99% of searches are, at best, a few top results from the same handful of sites that always seem to top the results, then a sea of spam. They seem to have just given up and ranked hard toward the top traffic sites and let the spam sites simply have the entire middle of the search rankings, starting around '08 or so. If you manage to search for something that's not on the couple hundred top sites, you end up with nothing but spam.