> I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade.

> I think people also have an inflated recollection of how good Google actually was back in 2005. I've been pointing this out for at least close to a decade. I know since I bothered to screenshot and blog about it in 2012. I'll admit mistakes happened back then too, but they were more forgivable like keyword stuffing on unrelated pages. Back then Google were on our side and removed those as fast as possible. Today however the problem isn't that someone hss stuffed the keyword into an unrelated page but that Google themselves mix a whole lot of completely irrelevant pages into the results, probably because some metrics go up when they do that. Thinking about it it seems logical that for a search engine that practically speaking has monopoly both on users and as mattgb points out - tonsome degree also on indexing - serving the correct answer first is just dumb: if they can keep me going between their search results and tech blogs with their ads embedded one, two or five times extra that means one, two or five times more ad impressions. Note that I'm not necessarily suggesting an grand evil master plan here, only that end-to-end metrics will improve as long as there is no realistic competition.