It's always been true to some extent, but I think it's SO that changed relatively recently, not the rest of the web.
In the earlier days of SO, it used to be that a search engine might return an SO link or two but they had a decent chance of being relevant. At that time, SO was smaller, the questions being asked were more common and general, and thus the answers were mostly correct and widely applicable.
Today, unfortunately, my usual experience is that there might be as many as 4-5 SO questions turning up on the first results page for a programming-related search, yet none of them is actually relevant. Some will probably already be closed with some hostile and quite possibly incorrect status. Some are effectively keyword stuffing and not actually relevant to what I was looking for, but don't get penalised as such by the search engines because SO as a whole is so well established. Particularly irritating, it's no longer rare to find that a question shows up that is relevant but either it has no answer or it has nothing but wrong or misleading answers (which may well have been voted up or accepted anyway).
It's not providing information in bite-sized chunks that's the problem, it's providing irrelevant, incorrect or out-of-date information, or attracting attention but then providing no information at all.