The issue is that the author expects to ask Google whether his or her cat can eat blueberries and expects and instant, accurate answer, free of charge. That is

The issue is that the author expects to ask Google whether his or her cat can eat blueberries and expects and instant, accurate answer, free of charge. That isn't free. It takes someone writing something about whether cats can eat blueberries, and then it takes a search engine having the incentives to index that content and point you to it. All this to answer what is, in the end, an extraordinarily trivial question that is of no consequence to anyone. All told, it's quite amazing that Google and the gusher of cash that its advertising produces has led to the provision of a service that people regularly consult for extraordinarily specific yet silly questions such as "can a cat eat blueberries." It's even more amazing that there are farms of people spending time to produce content to provide to this search engine. Yet all the author can think to do is complain that she gets a crappy answer to a silly question. The alternative to free, crappy answers to silly questions is not an amazing, perfect answer to silly questions. The author seems to think such answers once existed. They never did. Before Google you would get nothing but nonsense in response to a query like this. There isn't some vet clinic somewhere that crafts answers to this. There isn't some university professor doing it. There is no government doing it. This isn't like vital government data that taxes pay to produce, or commercially valuable information that someone will produce and post. This is the kind of content that is junk and that exists at all only because it's worthwhile for someone to create mounds of this crap and have Google index it so they can post ads. Google or its successor will likely improve over time--that is, they'll get better at creating incentives for the creation of low-value content like this so that people can ask their phones silly questions like this and get answers that are, perhaps, better than nothing. (Perhaps the answers are worse than nothing! In that case, stop looking for them! I never cared when my cat ate blueberries.) But Google did not somehow make the Internet worse. Google led to the creation of stuff that wasn't there at all before. That's a positive, not a net negative.