You're probably right about that. Although I can point to one very specific way the olden days were better: a Google search used to turn up lots of forum posts,

You're probably right about that. Although I can point to one very specific way the olden days were better: a Google search used to turn up lots of forum posts, which are often the most useful results on a given topic. These days I almost never see forum posts of any kind turned up a search results (except stack overflow, thankfully). I'm not sure what caused the change but I find useful information is much more likely to be buried by low-information wikihow-type results and corporate landing pages.