I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since befor

I disagree. The large sites which are charged with facilitating this breakdown have been around (and commanding a large portion of internet traffic) since before Google began degrading in-earnest. So did "effective" SEO, in fact. Google used to care about, and was still effective at, returning useful links well into the period that other entities were trying to undermine it. The first time that I noticed a reduction in Google Search efficacy was when they introduced Instant Search (or whatever they called the feature that presented results as users typed, rather than waiting for users to submit a full query). Even when they got rid of it, they never backtracked on whatever back-end changes enabled it (and degraded results in the service of presenting them faster). My suspicion is that this was the beginning of the public presentation of corporate infighting, where what the public saw from Google began to be less about good products and more about the products that particular execs, managers, and developers needed to "win" in order to bolster their careers (or what they perceive as such). This is why Google has developed a reputation for killing useful products, often replacing them with flashier and more frustrating alternatives (if at all). I don't like putting this on external factors. I think Google is doing this to themselves. It's a more private and stretched-out version of what's happening very publicly with Twitter right now.